


Theonite: Planet Adyn

by MLWang



Category: Original Work, Theonite Series - M. L. Wang
Genre: Action, Adventure, Afrofuturism, Alternate Universe, Angst, Anxiety, Crime Fighting, Elemental Magic, Fantasy, Feelings, Fighting, Friendship, Gen, Gender, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Loneliness, Magic, Middle School, Mystery, Novel, Original Fantasy, Original Science Fiction, Racism, Religion, Science Fiction, Slow Burn, Superheroes, Supernatural Elements, Superpowers, Suspense, Tragedy, Urban Fantasy, young adult
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-09
Updated: 2017-09-27
Packaged: 2018-12-24 04:00:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12004566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MLWang/pseuds/MLWang
Summary: The only thing scarier than finding out you have world-changing superpowers is finding out you aren't the only one.Joan Messi has spent thirteen lonely years hiding her supernatural abilities from her parents, her classmates, and everyone in her white bread suburban community. However, her little world of secrets is shattered when a pair of strangers arrive from a parallel dimension on the hunt for a nameless criminal. Now, after a lifetime of wondering where her powers came from, Joan might have found the beginnings of an answer.For Daniel Thundyil and his father, elemental powers and ego-maniacal supervillains are nothing new—although this is the first time a mission has brought them to a parallel dimension. Daniel's main concern in this new world isn't the looming threat of a godlike killer; it's fitting in at a school where the food is flavorless, everyone writes backwards in an ancient alphabet, and all the racial hierarchies seem to be reversed.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> _Planet Adyn_ is the first novel in my ongoing _Theonite_ series. Since I plan to make the bulk of this story available online anyway, I wanted to share it here on my favorite online reading platform.
> 
> If you want to know more about the world of _Theonite_ , you can find a glossary of terms, a guide to the Yammaninke alphabet, and other potentially fun, informative stuff at **mlwangbooks.com**.
> 
> Enjoy!

 

September 25, 2005 

Dunian Space

 

Daniel Thundyil leaned forward, drumming his heels against the side of a seat that was still just a little too high for him.

“So Dad, you realize when I said I’d be okay with moving again, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

Robin looked up from the control array to offer his son a thin smile. “I know, and I’m sorry to throw you into this on such short notice, but I had no choice.”

“You say that a lot.” Daniel frowned, then pulled his knees up to his chest to rest his chin on them, his feet still tapping absently on the edge of the seat. He hadn’t stopped fidgeting since they left the space center. The silence bothered him.

“Once you’re finished sulking, I think you’ll find this trip to be quite the adventure,” Robin said brightly.

“Right.” A surprise trip with a dad like Robin was always an adventure. It wasn’t the adventure part that bothered Daniel. He didn’t mind changing schools, and languages, and identities every time his father needed to track down a new psychopath. What he _did_ mind was being left out of the loop.

“It’s not every day you get to cross into a parallel dimension,” Robin said. “Aren’t you at least a little excited?”

“I guess.”

“Nervous?”

“I guess.”

Robin sank back in his seat, heaving a sigh that got lost in the muffling hum of the pod’s engines. Just a year ago, he would have been able to put a smile back on that face with a joke, or a song, or some half-made-up story about the constellations shifting all around them, but Daniel was getting to that dreaded age where kids are impossible to talk to. Robin had to marvel at how quickly his son had grown up. It didn’t seem all that long ago that he had been the moody adolescent with too much energy and not enough direction. Their custom-made vessel might have allowed them to leap across space and dimensions, but Robin and his growing son remained as firmly bound to time as any of their ancestors.

“What’s it like, you think?” Daniel said finally, turning his eyes to the star-studded infinity outside. “This other planet—dimension—thing.” He still didn’t seem to believe the idea even as he said it. Robin hardly believed it himself.

“Not unlike home, I would imagine,” Robin replied.

“What makes you say that?” Daniel twisted around in his seat to raise an eyebrow at his father. “Your engineer told me everything was all backwards and upside-down there. He said the people there weren’t, you know, like us.”

“They’re human,” Robin said, “and so are we. What else is there to know?”

Daniel rolled his eyes. “That’s not what I meant.”

“There will be cultural differences from what we’re used to. We won’t know exactly what those are until we get there, but we’ll figure it out. Don’t worry.”

“I never said I was worried. That’s you.”

“True.” Robin didn’t know what to do but laugh because Daniel had no idea how true it was. “You got me.”

“But just because I’m not worried doesn’t mean I get why we’re doing this,” Daniel said. “I’m still waiting for you to explain.”

“I’ve told you,” Robin said. “There is something I need to find, urgently, before it falls into the wrong hands.”

“Yeah, I know. You’ve said that like five times, but what? What is this thing you need to find so bad?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“Is that even true?” Daniel turned a skeptical frown on his father. “Or do you just not want to tell me?”

“I have some theories—”

“That you can’t tell me, right?”

Robin gave his son an apologetic smile.

“If we’re leaving our planet on a theory, it must be for something serious,” Daniel said. “So, this killer you won’t tell me anything about must be bad news, huh?”

“Daniel, I—”

“I know, I know,” Daniel scowled, slumping down in his seat to put his feet against the glass above the control panel. “The less I know, the safer I am.”

For a few moments Daniel sat crunched down in his seat, tapping an irritated rhythm on the glass with the soles of his shoes.

“I’m thirteen, Dad. Would it kill you to have me in the loop every once in a while?”

Robin didn’t answer.

“Come on,” Daniel begged, even though he knew it was pointless. “Could you at least give a name?”

“Killer 31, code name—”

“Code name: Mohan, I know,” Daniel cut him off. “Everyone’s really impressed with the cute little nicknames you give your enemies. I meant his real name.”

Robin shook his head. “You wouldn’t know him.”

“Him?” Daniel repeated. “Okay, so it’s a guy. Is he from our city?”

“Let me rephrase,” Robin said calmly. “You don’t _want_ to know him.”

“Yes, I do!” Daniel insisted. “If I’m going to take over for you some day—”

“You’re going to have to hold that thought,” Robin said, drumming the final measures of code into the control panel.

Daniel had just opened his mouth to protest when a violent shudder ran through the pod and the air around them thrummed with some invisible force.

“Whoa!” Daniel grabbed the arm of his seat in alarm. “What’s going on?”

“We’re about to cross over,” Robin said, his eyes fixed ahead.

“What—” Daniel began, but the rest of his morphed into an unintelligible gargle as the walls of the pod warped and stretched before him. A plunging sensation in the pit of Daniel’s stomach caused him to double over and realize that he had only one knee and upward of a hundred knuckles. He opened his mouth to scream only to find that his lungs had collapsed into his spleen, while his eardrums and elbows broke into a billion bright white grains of sand.

“Dad!” he cried out, but his voice had turned to sand as well. The glass dome of the pod crumbled to mix with the disintegrating stars, the swirl of whiteness swallowed him, and the world disappeared.

For some time—it could have been a few seconds or a few weeks for all they knew—neither father nor son saw, heard, or felt a thing. Then, all at once, both slid off the edge of limbo and back into their bodies.

Daniel let out an undignified yelp as reality deposited him back into his seat beside his father. Unable to work his limbs, he collapsed into a trembling lump of jelly, his breath coming in short, shaking gasps.

Robin closed his eyes and took a single breath to calm his own hammering heart before turning to put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Alright there, young man?” he asked mildly. “All of you make it through?”

Daniel could only gibber a stream of breathless nonsense, his eyes still fixed sightlessly on the pod glass opposite him.

“Let’s see…” Robin patted Daniel’s knee. “Your legs are here. Hands…” He gently uncurled one of his son’s clenched fists. “Here. Face…” He turned Daniel’s face toward him to look into those eyes that so resembled his own. “Here.”

When Daniel’s gaze locked with his father’s, he blinked back into consciousness.

“O-okay, okay!” Daniel stumbled into his voice as though lurching out of a dream. “I’m fine!” He swatted his father’s hand away. “I’m fine!”

“Attitude.” Robin smiled. “Here.”

“Oh—” Daniel gulped as he readjusted himself in his seat, still shaking. “Th-that was—”

“An adventure, no?”

“Sure,” Daniel let out an exasperated laugh. He didn’t think he would ever figure out how his father handled every crazy turn of their lives with such unwavering calm. It didn’t seem fair.

“S-so, that’s it?” Daniel asked, laying his spinning head back to stare out of the pod’s glass dome. “That’s really it? We just crossed dimensions?”

“If the readings here are correct, then yes,” Robin said. “We’re among the first—possibly the very first—to do so. Amazing, isn’t it? No one else in the universe has experienced the miracle of physics and technology we did just now.”

“Yeah, hooray,” Daniel said, putting a hand to his head to massage the dizziness out of it. “Who wouldn’t want to feel like they just got squeezed through a soda straw and blown into a million pieces? Seriously, if you’d told me we were going to have to— _what_?” he snapped when Robin started to laugh.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met another kid so used to the outlandish that he could find a way to be _annoyed_ by inter-dimensional space travel. You’d laugh at you too if you weren’t so busy being mad at me.” Before his son got the chance to retort, Robin pointed out the window. “Now take a look at that.”

“What?”

Turning, Daniel followed his father’s gaze and felt a gasp escape him. Even after a dozen trips in space, the sight of a planet up close was breathtaking.

“Is that it?” he asked softly.

“Yes.” Robin’s voice had also grown hushed with wonder. He leaned over Daniel to put a hand on the glass. “Isn’t it stunning, the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

Daniel made a thoughtful noise, cocking his head to get a better angle on the blue-green sphere outside the window. “I was expecting it to be—I don’t know— _purple_ or something, but it’s not. It looks just like home.”

“Doesn’t it?” Robin marveled, his eyes still fixed on the cloud-shrouded orb on the other side of the glass, the only planet in its little solar system capable of sustaining life. “Who would have thought that in between the fibers of our universe, there was a near carbon copy of home?”

As much as the sight filled Robin with wonder, it made him sad. He didn’t know why. It just did.

“What did you say its name was again?” Daniel asked.

“The few scientists who know of its existence refer to it as _Duna Fune_ or Planet Adyn, but I’m told the natives of this dimension have a different name for it.”

“What do they call it?”

“ _Earth_.”

 


	2. The Hum

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Planet Adyn_ is the first novel in my ongoing _Theonite_ series. Since I plan to make the bulk of this story available online anyway, I wanted to share it here on my favorite online reading platform.
> 
> If you want to know more about the world of _Theonite_ , you can find a glossary of terms, a guide to the Yammaninke alphabet, and other potentially fun, informative stuff at **mlwangbooks.com**.

 

Power means different things to different people. For poets and politicians, words are power. For some, money is power. For most of Earth’s history, weaponry and resources have constituted power. My grandfather always told me—and I believed for many years—that knowledge was power. But the funny thing about power is that no matter what you think it is, or how much you think you have, it’s the people above and all around you who get the final say.

I’m not sure how old I was when I first tried looking in the mirror and telling myself, with a shiver of pride and a warning prickle of something like fear, ‘I am the most powerful person in the world.’ In many ways, it was true. My hands and mind could do things no one else’s could, but I was too young then to understand that the kind of power that really matters comes from other people. And what good is being faster, or stronger, or smarter than everyone else when it leaves you all alone?

Looking back on my childhood, I couldn’t remember anyone ever trying to talk to me about my abilities. What I _did_ remember was sitting on the bench outside the daycare center office while my teacher, Ms. Mitchell, spoke in a low voice to my parents.

“I’m sorry to call the two of you in here,” she said, “but we need to talk about Joan.”

“What is it? Is she alright?” Mama asked.

I didn’t know why grown-ups thought I couldn’t hear them if they put a wall between us. I could always hear them.

“She’s not hurt or anything,” Ms. Mitchell said hastily. “Actually just the opposite. I’ve been noticing that she… well… she isn’t quite normal.”

Ms. Mitchell had always been my favorite daycare teacher, and I had thought I was one of her favorite kids. She had never had to meet with my parents about my behavior, so why was she suddenly talking in this cold, hushed tone like I’d done something wrong?

“You two must have noticed…”

“Noticed what?” Papa asked.

“Joan doesn’t move like other kids,” Ms. Mitchell said. “She’s heavy for her size, but she has this springy, sort of light way of walking, almost like gravity doesn’t affect her.”

“So you called us in here to tell us that Joan walks funny?” Papa said, unimpressed.

“No. Not just that. I’ve also noticed that nothing seems to hurt her. A couple weeks ago, while she was running around, she tripped and fell on the gravel path in the yard. She must have skidded four feet, but when she got up, her knees weren’t scraped. It was like nothing had happened at all. Then, a few days ago she got hit square in the head with a big wooden building block and didn’t bruise. She didn’t even blink.”

“Are you trying to say there’s something wrong with our daughter because she’s not a fragile crybaby?” Papa said in that impatient voice he got when he really just wanted someone to stop talking.

“No—I don’t know, Mr. Messi. After what I saw today, I really don’t know.”

I clutched the edge of the bench until I felt my fingernails digging into the wood. I knew what she was about to tell them, but I had only been trying to help. Eva and I had been playing with a toy truck. As we rolled it back and forth, I had pushed it a little too hard and it had rolled past her, right into the little space between the fence and the play shed. Eva had stuck her arm behind the shed to get it, but she couldn’t reach.

“Want my truck!” she shouted in frustration. “Want truck!” She started to cry, and Ms. Mitchell came over to comfort her.

“Okay, Eva,” she said, pulling the three-year-old away from the shed and patting her on the back. “You’re okay. It looks like you’re going to have to find a different toy to play with.” But Eva didn’t stop crying.

“Want that one!” she sobbed, and I felt my tummy twist up in guilt. I hated it when other kids were sad, and it was my fault we had lost the truck.

“It’s okay, Eva!” I piped up. “I’ll get it!”

Crossing past Eva and Ms. Mitchell, I gripped the edge of the play shed and pulled it away from the fence. It made a nasty grating sound as it dragged across the concrete, but that was nothing compared to the scream that hit my ears a moment later.

Startled, I turned to see Ms. Mitchell staring at me with an expression that didn’t belong on her kind, calm face. She had let go of Eva and both her hands were over her mouth. Her eyes that were usually so warm were wide and cold with fear, like she had just seen a monster.

“I just wanted to get the truck,” I tried to explain, thinking maybe she was upset because I had gone behind the shed without permission. I waited for a moment for her to scold me, to laugh, to tell me she had just been joking. But she didn’t say anything. She just gathered a sniffling Eva in close to her and slowly backed away.

“I-I don’t know how she did it,” Ms. Mitchell was stuttering to my parents. “She’s only four!”

“She eats her vegetables,” Papa said. “I don’t see why this is a reason to call us both in from work.”

“Mr. Messi, I don’t think you understand. That shed weighs over four hundred pounds. It took three workmen to move it into the yard.”

“W-well then it couldn’t have been Joan,” Mama said with a nervous laugh. “Maybe it was the wind, or maybe you just weren’t seeing right.”

“The wind? Mrs. Messi, I was right there. Now, I’ve been working with kids for over thirty years, and I’ve seen them do some strange things, but this… this was beyond strange.”

“Alright, this is ridiculous.” I heard the scrape of a chair as my dad stood up. “If you’re just going to waste our time with fantasy stories—”

“Marcel,” Mama said reproachfully, “don’t be rude.”

“No, we don’t have to listen to this nonsense,” Papa snapped. “We’re done here.” As he and Mama came out of the office, I heard him mutter, “I can’t believe I cancelled my four-o-clock for this.”

Mama didn’t respond. She just pressed her lips together, looking sad, and said, “Let’s go, Joan,” without looking at me.

“Go on, sweetheart,” Ms. Mitchell said as my parents made their way to the door. “Get your outside clothes from your cubby.”

Ms. Mitchell had always applauded my ability to put my shoes and coat on by myself—apparently it was difficult for most kids my age—but today she didn’t smile, she didn’t congratulate me. She just watched with an uneasy frown as I tugged my dull rubber boots on over my socks and stood up to get my coat off its hook.

Mama and Papa had gone out ahead of me so they could argue on the other side of the glass door where they thought I couldn’t hear.

“Marcel—”

“Don’t,” Papa cut her off. “Josie, just don’t.”

“But don’t you think we should at least talk about this?” Mama’s voice rose in pitch like it always did when she was on the edge of tears.

“There’s nothing to talk about. She’s a normal girl.”

“Ms. Mitchell doesn’t think—”

“Ms. Mitchell is an idiot,” Papa said shortly.

“Then maybe… maybe we should send her to a different daycare?”

“If you want to go to the trouble. It’s your time.”

“It would be nice to have your support—”

“I don’t understand you, Josie!” Papa burst out. “Why do you do this? Why do you have to blow everything out of proportion? I’m so sick of your treating every little thing like it’s the end of the… good God, are you crying?” His voice took on an exasperated edge. “You’re _not_ crying.”

When I had my coat on, Ms. Mitchell held the door open for me. I noticed she stood a few steps back as I walked through, and she didn’t offer me her usual goodbye hug.

“Alright, Josie, pull yourself together,” Papa dropped his voice to a whisper as I came outside, as though that made any difference.

“I just—what if there’s something really wrong with her?” Mama squeaked. “All that stuff when she was a baby and now this—”

“There is nothing wrong with her,” Papa hissed. “Here, I’ll prove it. Hey, Joan!”

“Marcel—” Mama protested, but he ignored her.

“Open this door,” he said, rapping his knuckles against the sliding side door of his SUV.

“Marcel, don’t do this.”

“Why?” Papa said sharply. “What do you think she’s going to do? Rip the door off?” He turned back to me. “Go on, Joan. Open it.”

I hesitated for a moment, looking from Mama to Papa, and then went to the car. Standing on my tippy-toes, I grasped the door-handle in both hands. The steel sang lightly beneath my fingers, tightening my grip, inviting me to pull on it. I was about to slide the door open when my eyes found Mama’s worried face and I stopped.

I remembered the way Ms. Mitchell had looked at me and realized that I couldn’t bear to have Mama look at me that way—with that kind of fear. So I tugged at the door weakly and pretended it was too heavy.

“I can’t do it,” I said after a moment.

Mama’s shoulders relaxed in relief, Papa said “There, you see,” and everything went back to normal—except that Ms. Mitchell was never the same around me again. She wouldn’t look me in the face when I talked to her, or hold me when I went to hug her.

That day at the daycare, I realized two things. The first was that I was stronger— _much_ stronger—than anyone around me. The second was that I could never let anyone know that. For whatever reason, grown-ups didn’t like my strength. They didn’t want to see it. They didn’t want to talk about it. It scared them. And I didn’t want people to be scared of me. I wanted them to like me.

So at the tender age of four, I began treading lightly, carefully monitoring my every movement to conceal my strength, to be as normal as possible. I taught myself to open doors and pull out chairs as though it took effort. I learned to control my reflexes so that I never made a move that was too fast or forceful. I learned to walk like other people, setting each foot down heavily as though my own weight bore down on me more than it really did.

By the age of five, I had become an expert at masking my strength and speed. By the age of six, I could fool anyone into thinking I was just like any other kid. But I would soon discover that my superhuman strength wasn’t the only abnormal thing about me. I was seven years old when the real weirdness reared its head.

Like a lot of girls that age, seven-year-old me loathed boys. Mostly because they thought they were better than me. The whole world acted like boys were better than girls. The superheroes on TV, the great historical figures we learned about in school, the supposed strongest and fastest people in the world were all male—then at recess, the boys at school thought they got to act like I wasn’t good enough to play their games. And how dare they think that when I was stronger and faster than all of them, and their older brothers, and their dads. Of course, none of them actually knew about the super-strength I was so careful to hide, but it made me furious all the same.

So when Tyreese’s mother told him that he and his brothers had to invite me to join their baseball game, I jumped at the chance to show them how dumb they were for trying to exclude me.

“Please, can I go? Please?” I begged, dancing in circles around Mama as she carried the laundry out to the line.

“You’re not done with your chores yet.”

“Yes, I am.” Truth be told, I had cheated, but I figured there was no harm cleaning at triple speed in my room where no one could see.

“Joan,” Mama sighed, “you know I don’t like you playing with those boys.”

“Why not?” I demanded. “You let me go play at Ryan’s house.”

“I—that—that’s because I know Ryan’s mother.”

“You know Tyreese’s mom. She brought us Christmas cookies.”

I never really understood why Mama didn’t like Tyreese’s family. Every time they were around, she stood weird, and laughed weird, and got all jumpy like they might bite her. Sometimes I wondered if it was because they were the only black family in the neighborhood, but my kindergarten teacher said that was racist and Mama was too nice to be racist, so that couldn’t be it.

Whatever her reasoning, she always had some excuse for why I couldn’t go play with Tyreese and his brothers. “You know how boys like that are,” she would say, or “you want to be careful around those kinds of people,” or “you know those boys are just trouble.”

Today it was the always-ridiculous, “They just play so rough. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Please, Mama!” I pressed, knowing I could wear her down if I kept at it. “I’ll wear a helmet,” I said, even though my skull was undoubtedly harder than any protective gear I might put over it.

“But honey, what about your hands?” Mama said. “You don’t even have a glove.”

“Zander is going to lend me his old one. Please!”

“Alright,” she caved with a worried sigh. “Just be careful.”

“I will!” I promised, already skipping across the yard to meet up with the boys.

I did have to be careful any time I played with other kids, just not for the reasons Mama thought. It was easy to forget how strong I was while caught up in the excitement of a game. I had to be careful to stay in control.

The sun was beating down on the dusty field when we got there. Weeks of dry heat had turned the grass crunchy beneath our shoes, and the static whir of cicadas all but drowned out the boys’ voices as they negotiated positions.

“Stand over here,” Tyreese said, pushing me as far into right field as he could. “If the ball comes to you, just throw it to one of us.”

“Don’t try to tag anyone out yourself,” Zander added. “You’re not fast enough.”

I spent half of that first inning completely ignored, rocking on the balls of my feet in an uncomfortable mixture of nervousness and indignation, jumping every time I thought the ball might be headed in my direction and hating the way Zander’s old glove felt on my hand. The leather sat thick and heavy around my fingers as they curled in anxiety. When it was finally my team’s turn to bat, I tore the smothering thing off and hurled it to the ground. My hands twitched as I watched each of my teammates step up to bat. By the time my turn came, my nervousness had mounted to a crackling knot of bright white heat at the center of my chest.

Tyreese and one of the other kids from what the older boys were calling ‘Team Loser’ had already struck out. Mark, the annoying ten-year-old from the next block over, was a killer pitcher.

“Don’t screw up, Cootie-face,” Zander sighed glumly as he held the bat out to me.

The bristling knot in my chest flared as I snatched the bat from him and the sound of cicadas swelled in my ears. The aluminum prickled beneath my fingers like it was alive as I stepped up to the plate and slung the bat to my shoulder in my best imitation of the players on TV. Mark, the pitcher, laughed, and the anger crackled from my chest to fill my body. I could feel the metal vibrating in my clenched hands as Mark drew his arm back.

He flung the ball. I swung with all my fury, but I wasn’t prepared for the way the bat threw me off balance, and I ended up staggering in a circle without hitting anything. Mark and the rest of the older boys snickered while pained groans rose from Team Loser.

“I told you we shouldn’t have let a girl on our team,” one of the kids behind me muttered, thinking I couldn’t hear him.

“It wasn’t my idea,” Tyreese said as he rolled the ball back to the pitcher’s mound. “My mom said we had to.”

“It’s okay, girly,” Mark laughed, stooping to pick up the ball. “We’ll give you that one free, since you’re a lady.”

I ground my teeth together and the energy in me came roaring right up to my eyeballs. That was when I decided I _would_ hit that ball. I would hit it with all my unstoppable strength, and it would go ‘ping,’ and it would fly so far that no one would ever see it again.

The bat was trembling, but not because my hands were shaking; my anxiety, my indignation, and my anger were all clamoring up from deep inside me, narrowing to a single strain of hard determination that resonated through my arms into the bat. The surge grew louder, stronger, until I couldn’t tell where my body ended and the metal began, until there was nothing in the world except my will to smash that ball.

Mark wound up and threw. My whole universe shrank to the little hunk of cork and cowhide, and I swung.

I missed.

I knew that I missed because there was no ‘ping,’ no ‘thwack,’ no feeling of impact. But the next thing anyone knew, the ball was hurtling back the way it had come.

“Whoa!” Tyreese exclaimed as the ball shot like a bullet past Mark, past the infielders, past the outfielders, zipping over two hundred feet of open grass to plunge into the wooded area behind the park.

The older boys could only stand there and blink in confusion as Team Loser broke into cheers.

“Run, Cootie-face!” they shouted, jumping up and down. “Run, run!”

I didn’t need to run—that ball wasn’t found until a month later when a neighbor kid fished it out of the swamp behind those little woods—but when I felt Tyreese and Zander pushing me toward first base, I stumbled into motion. Careful not to let my jittery legs move too fast, I jogged my way around the field and back around to home base.

“That was the coolest!” Tyreese clapped me on the shoulder.

“What even happened?” another boy asked. “It looked like the bat didn’t even touch the ball!”

“It didn’t,” I said, still flexing my fingers in an effort to work the buzzing twitch out of them.

“What do you mean?” Tyreese laughed.

“I mean—I didn’t hit it with the bat,” I said. “I hit it with my feelings.”

“What?”

“Well, not just my feelings,” I said to clarify. “I also had to concentrate really hard.”

It was a difficult sensation to describe, almost like my willpower had flowed right through my arms, through the bat, and into the air around it to make contact with the ball. It was like, for a split second, I had made the metal and air a part of me. Anyone could do it if they concentrated hard enough—couldn’t they?

“What are you talking about?” Zander asked, scrunching up his face in confusion.

“I’m talking about when you use what you feel to move something without touching it. You guys know when that happens, right? You know what I’m talking about.”

All I got in response was wall of blank stares. The cicadas had fallen silent.

“See, the bat is metal,” I tried to explain to their uncomprehending faces. “You know how metal sort of… _hums_ when you hold it? And sometimes, when it’s humming like that, you can push your feelings through it and use it to move stuff?” It was something I had always been able to do. Why were they all looking at me like I was crazy?

“What’s wrong with her?” one of the boys whispered.

“Girls are weird,” Zander said in a knowing voice. “They always wanna talk about their feelings.”

“I’m not being weird,” I protested angrily, “and I’m not just talking about my feelings, I’m talking about my…” but as soon as I started the sentence, I realized that I didn’t have a word for it. _Was_ there a word for what I had just done?

As I looked around at Tyreese, Zander, and the others, it was obvious that they had no idea what I was trying to describe. Now that I thought about it, no one ever seemed to know what I was talking about when this came up.

There had been the time Papa had been fishing in his pocket for change in the grocery store line and I told him, “You don’t have enough.”

“What?”

“You only have a penny and three dimes,” I said, nodding to the coins I could feel humming through the denim of his pocket. “It’s not enough.”

He looked at me in stunned silence—as though it was somehow strange that I knew what was in his pocket without looking—before getting out his credit card and paying with that instead.

Then there was the time Mama lost her car keys.

“What are you doing?” I had asked, unable to figure out why she was frantically digging through her purse when the keys were calling out from the car floor as clear as bells. “They’re under your seat.”

“Really?” she said, sticking her hand under the driver’s seat and groping blindly in all the wrong places. “Did you see them fall down there?”

“No, I feel them,” I said. “They’re more to the left. Can’t you feel them?”

Mama had paused then and looked up at me with that tense, alarmed expression that told me I had said something unsettling. I just didn’t know what it was.

“They’re right by your hand,” I said, leaning forward in my booster. “You can’t feel them at all?”

Mama didn’t answer. She had stopped grasping for the keys.

“Here.” I made a pushing motion with my arm, nudging the keys toward her. When they bumped up against her fingertips, she uttered a scream of surprise that made me stop.

“Sorry,” I said, lowering my arm. I wasn’t sure what I was apologizing for. I just knew I had never seen Mama’s eyes so wide.

“You—wh-what do you mean you’re sorry?” She looked at me and I could tell she was scared. “That wasn’t _you_ …?”

I hadn’t known what to say, so I had just shaken my head.

“Hey, Joan?” Tyreese asked, leaning in to peer under my baseball cap at me. “You okay?”

“Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t at all sure I was.

Until then, I had thought maybe my parents couldn’t do what I did because they just weren’t very perceptive or smart, but if Tyreese and the other boys couldn’t do it either, did that mean _most_ people couldn’t do it? Was _that_ why there was no word for it?

“I’m going home,” I said abruptly.

“What?” Tyreese said. “You can’t leave! We just started!”

“I’m sorry.” I turned and made for the sidewalk.

“Let her go,” Zander said. “We don’t need any girls.” And I was too caught up in my thoughts to even get angry at him.

I had always known I was stronger than everyone else. I had always known I had better eyesight and hearing than everyone else. Could it be that I had an extra sense—an extra ability—that other people just didn’t have at all?

 Most people, I had noticed, needed to see or touch something to know what it was made of, but I just needed to stand near it. I could walk into a pitch dark room and know the mass, texture, and composition of everything within ten feet of me without reaching out to touch any of it with my hands.

Metals were the most distinct to me, always pulling at my skin, singing their presence wherever I went, demanding my attention. And each metal had its own voice, from the plaintive keening of copper wires to the low drone of the nickels in my piggybank.

One night, as I lay under the covers with my fingers flexing against the sheets, I found that I could respond to the hum of the steel bedframe beneath my mattress. As my hand opened and closed, I pulled at the metal, bringing it into the control of my fingers, moving it. It wasn’t until I heard the groan and pop of springs that realized I should probably stop before I collapsed the whole bed under me. It hadn’t seemed that weird at the time. If materials like metal could reach out and touch my mind, why shouldn’t my mind be able to reach out and touch them in return?

Water was another substance I had always been good at sensing, the richer in minerals the better. Many nights, as I sat in the bath, I had closed my eyes and felt the water, heavy with magnesium particles, stirring against my skin. Through some playful experimentation, I had found that I could whip up a swirling funnel of water by moving my fingers in circles above the surface, or send a soapy wave rolling the length of the tub with a sweep of my hand. I even tried getting some of the bathwater to levitate but quickly found that water was an uncooperative substance, slipperier and less responsive than metal. Getting it to rise out of the tub required not only intense concentration, but also a sort of relaxed steadiness that I couldn’t quite manage. If my fingers tensed up or my focus faltered for a fraction of a second, I would lose my grip, and the water would splash back into the tub. I had given up after only a few tries without it ever occurring to me that other people couldn’t get water to levitate at all.

While moving metal and water was nothing new for me, the incident with the baseball was different. It was the first time my influence had extended beyond the familiar hum of the metal to move the air around it. But more than that, it was the first time that I realized that other people couldn’t do what I did.

Maybe I should have been alarmed, wary of this strange ability no one else seemed to possess. But all I felt was excitement as I covered the distance back to my house in quickening strides, barely resisting the urge to break into a sprint.

“Joan,” Mama said in surprise when I entered the kitchen. “You’re back early. Is everything okay?”

“Yes,” I said, and hurried past her to my room.

“You’re not hurt, are y–”

“Nope.” I shut the door.

Leaning back against the wall, I listened for a moment to make sure Mama wasn’t going to come knocking to pester me some more. When her shuffling footsteps stayed in the kitchen, I rushed to the toy box. With my hands still twitching with energy, I scrambled to pick up the first few action figures I could find. In my fumbling excitement, it took me a few tries to stand them up, but I finally got them into neat row on my dresser. Now that I was conscious of this unique ability, I wanted I wanted to test it. I wanted to see exactly what it could do.

Settling myself down in my chair, I stared at the action figures, took a deep breath, and swung my open hand past them as I had swung the bat at the ball.

Nothing happened.

I paused for a moment, rubbing my fingers together, and tried to think back to how I had hit that homerun. The energy hadn’t just come from movement. It had come from emotion. I needed to let everything I was feeling—all this anticipation, and fascination, and nervousness—overtake me like it had back on the field.

It wasn’t difficult. I only had to draw in a few deep breaths before my heart began pounding with excitement and I felt that swell of energy that was so hard to describe—like the shudder of a starting engine, the fits of bubbles at the surface of boiling water, the clamor of a tree filled with cicadas, I swung my hand again and—

“Whoa!” I jumped as the energy jolted out of me faster, harder than I meant it to. I wasn’t even sure what had happened, but in an instant, my lamp had shot off the bedside table to crash into my bookshelf in a spray of sparks and broken porcelain.

“Oh… oops.” I lowered my hand, shaken. That confirmed it: I could move solid objects with my feelings—but that hadn’t been what I meant to do at all. I was still missing something. Shaking out my hand, I thought back again to the moment I hit that ball. There had been movement, there had been emotion— and what else? _What else?_

Concentration, I realized, after flexing my fingers for a moment. In the split second before the swing, I had been nervous, I had been angry, but I had channeled all of it into hitting that ball. It wasn’t enough to just whip my feelings into a frenzy, I had to _focus_ them.

Biting my lip, I stared into the painted plastic faces of each of the action figures in turn, telling myself I wanted to knock them down, I needed to knock them down. I swung again and sure enough, a burst of energy shot down my arm and hit the toys, sending them tumbling across the room.

“Yes!” I leapt from my chair to punch the air. “I’m a wizard!”

Just then my bedroom door opened and Papa stuck his head in. “Hey Joan, are you throwing things in here?”

“No.” I said, edging sideways to hide the broken lamp from view. “No, I’m…” I fumbled and then, in a strange moment of curiosity, I decided to tell him the truth, just to see what would happen. “I’m moving my toys without touching them.”

“Really?” Papa raised an eyebrow. “You mean like with your mind?”

I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. Mostly he just looked impatient.

“Yes,” I said, rubbing my fingers together nervously. “Like that.”

“So you’re pretending to have telekinesis?” He wasn’t serious. He thought this was all a joke.

“Does it have to be pretend?” I asked quietly.

“What?”

“Do you think—” I swallowed. “Do you think, if I tried really hard, I could move my toys with my mind?”

“Sure.” He snorted. “Good luck with that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on, Joan, you know you can’t just move things around with your mind. That kind of thing only happens in cartoons. It’s not possible in real life.”

And I realized that he was right. According to everything I had learned from watching other people interact with the world around them, it _was_ impossible. I knew just as well as any other kid how the world worked. I had had the same kindergarten science classes as everyone else, grown up in the same reality as everyone else; why was I the only one who never seemed to fit into it?

“You know that, right?” Papa said and for the first time I noticed something like concern creasing his forehead. His hand had tightened around the doorknob.

 “Yeah, I know,” I said, trying to make my uneasiness sound like annoyance. “I’m just playing pretend.”

“Well, pretend more quietly, okay?” he said. “I’m trying to get some work done.”

“Okay, Papa.”

As he left I turned from the door to stare down at my hands, certain now that I could do the impossible. Years later, I didn’t remember the day of that baseball game as the day I discovered my powers; I remembered it as the day I discovered that they were something special—and the day I started to explore them.

For the rest of that afternoon, I experimented with moving different things in my room. Using my hands to stir up the air, I could make loose papers dance like fairies. I found some coins in a jar and entertained myself for over an hour making them jump and spin back and forth across my dresser. With some practice I could lift one into the air and—if I focused really hard—get it to float there for a few seconds before it dropped back down to bounce across the carpet.

To my dismay—but not surprise—not everything was as easy to move as copper pennies. As metals pulled at my awareness, there were substances that pushed against it. I identified them better by their silence than their song. Wood muffled my senses, while rubber, plastic, and glass cut out spaces of stark silence. Knowing that, I wasn’t shocked when all my concentrated efforts to move my eraser only got a feeble twitch out of it. Even though I could fly sheets of loose-leaf all over the room on an air current, the paper itself was slow to respond to my powers. My plastic action figures were also less than cooperative; I could only move them by blowing wind at them, or by latching my powers onto the tiny metal screws holding their joints together.

I would have gone on to test my newfound power on every solitary item in the room if Mama hadn’t come knocking on my door to call me to dinner. I spent the meal in a daze, nearly forgetting to eat as my fingers fidgeted, feeling out everything around me, trying to decide how easy it would be to dig into it with my powers and move it.

“Joan?” Mama’s voice said, breaking my focus. “Are you okay?”

“What?” I blinked. “Yeah, I’m fine.” And I realized that I had closed my eyes in concentration.

“Did you just fall asleep?” Papa asked.

“Um, yeah,” I said, even though I had never felt more awake in my life.

“Oh sweetie,” Mama said. “I knew you shouldn’t have gone out to play with those boys. It was probably too much. After dinner, we’ll get you into bed, okay?”

“Okay.”

It was only later, after Mama had tucked me in, that it occurred to me to wonder why I hadn’t told my parents about my powers. Sure, I had mentioned what I was doing to Papa, but only as an experiment. The strange thing was that it had never even crossed my mind to tell either him or Mama for real. I was so used to hiding my strength from them that my first impulse was to conceal anything important.

I still remembered that day at daycare with Ms. Mitchell; I knew how they reacted to anything out of the ordinary. Papa would do his best to ignore it by running away to the office. Mama would try to cover it up, or worse, get it fixed. Neither of them would understand that this wasn’t something that needed to be fixed. It was part of me. And I wanted to explore it without any parents, or teachers, or doctors sticking their fingers into it.

I decided then, staring up into the darkness with the world humming all around me, that I would never tell my parents about my power. I would learn to use it in secret, behind the closed door of my bedroom, where it could be mine, just mine, and no one could ruin it with their worry, or judgment, or fear.

 

........

 

There was no word for my ability to sense and move the things around me, so I came up with my own. I called it the Hum, because that was what it felt like—all the substances of the world humming to me at their different frequencies, and responding when I hummed back at just the right pitch.

For those first few months of practice, using my powers went a little like flying in a dream; sometimes it flowed smoothly, sometimes I could flail until I was blue in the face and barely move one paperclip. There were days I wore myself ragged grasping at ropes of water only to have them slide through my fingers onto the floor, or heaved until I was light-headed without working up a decent air current. But there were also days—when my head was clear and my heart was light—that I could lift my hands and conduct a room full of Humming objects like my own personal orchestra.

For years, that daily practice time in my room was the one thing that kept me sane and happy. But under the comforting rush of the Hum, there was always a darker undercurrent of questions. What were these powers? How had they come to be part of me? Was there anyone else who could do what I did? Or was I the only one? Those questions ate at me, gnawing at my insides every night as I lay awake at night, creating an insatiable hollow at the center of my being.

I spent hours each day flipping through books, my eyes scanning hungrily, raking every paragraph for evidence of people with abilities like mine. Of course, human history and myth was teeming with gods, saints, and sorcerers with supernatural powers, but they were all distant legends with no basis in fact. There was nothing in those pages that could explain me, nothing to fill the hollow. After years of reading, and thinking, and theorizing, all I had were the gnawing teeth of more questions. Could I be a regular human who had been exposed to radiation as a child like the superheroes in my comics and cartoons? Was I the result of some kind of secret experiment? Was I a wizard? A demigod? An alien? Had I somehow sold my soul to the Devil?

That last question shook me the most—not that I thought it was possible. I didn’t even believe there _was_ a devil. Mama had made a weak effort to raise me Catholic, but like my father, I had never bought the whole God thing (it was one of the few things on which the two of us could agree). To me, God seemed like a refuge people like Mama made up for themselves when they weren’t strong enough to deal with reality.

But for me there was no refuge. My Sunday school teachers had made it abundantly clear that supernatural abilities like mine were not welcome in God’s world. And if God was going to reject me for the one thing that made me happy, I was going to reject him right back. Mama said religion was supposed to inspire kindness and acceptance; all I ever saw it inspire in people was intolerance and fear. Fortunately for me, I didn’t need other people. I certainly didn’t need a god. I was not like Mama.

I was not weak.

I was the most powerful person in the world.

Discovering my powers wasn’t what changed my life. For thirteen years, my powers _were_ my life. What changed it was the discovery that I was not the only one.

 


	3. New Neighbors

 

The day the world turned upside down started out pretty normal, with me up early, bent over my desk, scribbling away at some last-minute homework. I could easily have finished it all the previous night, but my grandpa’s old book on the Napoleonic Wars had proved much more engaging and I didn’t see any reason I should put that aside in favor of this mind-numbingly boring worksheet:

 

**What was the date of the Sugar Act?**

_April 5, 1764_

 

**What was the Sugar Act?**

_It was a modified version of the Sugar and Molasses Act of 1733 (which our textbook doesn’t mention) that required colonial merchants to pay a tax of six pence on every imported gallon of molasses. However, this act was intended to be more strictly enforced (they were pretty easily avoided before) and included more items to be taxed, including sugar, wines, coffee, etc. I could explain the impact this had in the colonies and how it relates to the American Revolution, but you didn’t ask, so I won’t._

 

 

**What was the date of the Proclamation of 1763?**

_October 7, 1763. Duh._

 

I had barely even opened my insipid eighth-grade history textbook. I already knew most of the hard facts it had to offer—dates, names, and numbers—and unlike the idiots who wrote it, I actually understood the significance of a few of them.

 

**What was the date of the Stamp Act?**

_March 22, 1765_

 

**What was the Stamp Act?**

_It required citizens of the American colonies to put taxes on all newspapers and official documents. This act represented the British Parliament’s first serious attempt to establish governmental authority in the colonies and had to do with the debt amassed during the Seven Years’ War, but you didn’t ask about any of that stuff and there’s no more space here, so I won’t talk about it._

 

**What was the date of the Boston Massacre?**

_March 5, 1770_

 

**What was the Boston Massacre?**

_A fight between rioters and British soldiers that began when approximately fifty protestors attacked British Officer Captain Thomas Preston, and resulted in the British firing into the unarmed crowd. Five of the colonists were killed, including free black man, Crispus Attucks._

 

“And done!” I set my pencil down with a flourish. “Of course, a competent teacher would check to make sure I actually understood how all these events tied together to lead to the Revolutionary War, but why bother with actually understanding the stuff we memorize? It’s just school right? No need to actually teach us anything. That would just be overkill.”

My knowledge of history was partly thanks to my ability to remember everything I read. But more than my near-photographic memory, I had my grandfather to thank. Without him, I never would have put my machine of a memory to such good use. He was the one who had taught me to enjoy the histories and mythologies I read instead of just combing them for answers.

You might think having every fact in the history books stored in your mind would make middle school a breeze, but no, knowing the joy of honest learning just made the stupidity of my classes unbearable.

“I mean, I know I’ve got a head start on most kids,” I muttered, looking down at the completed worksheet, “but I think even my classmates are too smart for this crap. Who thinks that—”

“Joan!” Mama’s voice called from the bottom of the stairs. “Breakfast is ready!”

“Okay, coming!” I said, and flopped back in my chair with a sigh.

“Thanks for listening, Erik.” I smiled wryly at the Magneto poster above my desk. “You too, Clark.” I swiveled to face the Superman poster stuck to the opposite wall. “You guys are the best.”

“I made your favorite,” Mama said when I got downstairs. “Blueberry pancakes.”

“Oh. Thanks.” I had told Mama five, maybe six, times now that I didn’t actually like blueberry pancakes. She just thought I did because she had nice memories of making them for me when I was little. I hadn’t enjoyed them since I was five, but it was pointless to talk to Mama about anything, even something as trivial as pancake preferences.

Cutting a piece of pancake out with the side of my fork, I skewered it and put it in my mouth. It stuck there, gummy and waxy, as I started to chew. Undercooked. I swallowed and refrained from making a face. I should have gotten downstairs earlier and just grabbed a bowl of cereal.

“How are the pancakes honey?” Mama asked distractedly, pouring herself some coffee.

“Well…” I started, but when I looked up at Mama, she was such a sad picture—with that taut smile on her lips and those circles around her eyes—that whatever snide remark I had been planning died on my lips. “Good. They’re really good.”

“Good,” she murmured and sank down in the chair opposite mine with her coffee cupped determinedly between her hands.

My mother was beautiful. There was no denying that, even at her thinnest and most strained. I knew from photographs that she had once been radiant, filled with an easy, smiling charm like sunshine. I had never seen her like that, but I had always thought of her as pretty in a quivering, wispy sort of way, like the echo of a sweet sound.

When she was busy, she moved around with a desperate fevered energy that teetered on the edge of hyperventilation. When she sat still, she was the saddest thing I had ever seen. I couldn’t bear it when she was still.

“So, Mom,” I said to break the silence. “You know how Ms. Davis left that message yesterday?”

Mama didn’t even look up at me. She was far gone, her gaze lost in whatever sad thoughts were swirling in her untouched coffee.

“Mom?” I tried again. “You in there?”

No response. Just her shallow breaths and a short sniff as she tried to keep herself together.

She always got like this when Papa was away on one of his ‘extended business trips.’ I knew I shouldn’t blame her—but I did. I blamed her for not divorcing him. I blamed her for gritting her teeth and smiling when he came home three days late with some other woman’s stuff in his car. I blamed her for crying where he couldn’t hear instead of looking him in the eye, yelling at him, doing _something_. But my poor, spineless mother had only one way of dealing with anything that upset her and that was to deny it.

Mama was kind, and beautiful, and even intelligent when she put in the effort, but she was a coward. I wasn’t sure of a lot of things about myself, but one thing I knew with ferocious certainty: I never wanted to be weak like my mother.

“Mama,” I said again.

“Sorry—what?” She looked up from her coffee like a startled deer.

“I asked if you heard Ms. Davis’ message from yesterday?”

“Um… who?” she asked.

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “Ms. Davis. My math teacher. You met her at conferences.”

“Oh. Yes.”

“She called and left a message.”

“Oh,” Mama murmured blankly. “I must have missed it. I got held up chatting with our neighbors down the street. Did you know someone’s moving into that house on the corner?”

“The ridiculously big one?” I asked.

“Yes. They seemed nice. I talked to the man, Robin… Robin… oh, what was his last name? Thunder? No—Thundall? Something like that. Something weird. He had a son your age. They were moving in some boxes when I passed. It might be nice to have some new neighbors.”

“But you did listen to Ms. Davis’ message?” I asked, refusing to let her change the subject, although I wasn’t sure why.

“We should take them a casserole. Or maybe something else. Do Indians like pie?”

“Mom,” I prompted.

“Oh. Right.” She blinked. “Ms. David. Wh-why was she calling?”

“To let you know I’m failing math class.”

“What?” Mama looked so distraught that I immediately backpedaled.

“Well—not failing exactly,” I said hastily. “I’m getting a low C.”

“Oh, thank God.” She put a hand to her heart. “Honey, you scared me. You’re so good at math. Why aren’t you doing well?”

“Because I haven’t been turning in my homework.”

Mama shook her head in confusion. “Why?”

“I don’t—I just brought it up to tell you that I did all my homework for today, so you don’t have to worry.”

“Oh.” Mama relaxed. “Good.”

“And it’s done well,” I added, because she didn’t ask.

For weeks, I had been rushing home to delete messages from teachers who were “concerned about my progress” before Mama got back from work. Of course, if any of my teachers paid any attention to their students, they would have known that I wasn’t neglecting my homework because it was too challenging; I was neglecting it because it was _boring_.

I didn’t care about my grades. I knew they weren’t an accurate reflection of my intelligence, so watching them plummet didn’t bother me. I only deleted my teachers’ messages because I didn’t want to make Mama any more stressed than she already was.

I had gotten home before Mama yesterday, as usual. I had listened to Ms. Davis’ message on the answering machine, and for a long time I had stood with my hand hovering over the delete button. I didn’t know what made me pause. Maybe I was a tiny bit annoyed that I’d gone almost a quarter now with the worst grades I’d ever gotten and neither of my parents had even noticed. Maybe I was just curious to see what Mama would do when confronted with the idea that her smart, well-behaved daughter was in danger of flunking a class. Would she care enough to sit me down and lecture me? Would she get angry? Would she do anything at all?

But of course she hadn’t.

My carefully honed powers of deception were utterly wasted on my mother. I probably could have set the kitchen on fire and she wouldn’t have batted an eye until the flames were licking at her ankles.

I was grateful to find that I was running late when I looked at the clock again. It gave me an excuse to leave most of the mushy pancakes on my plate.

“Bye, Mom,” I said as I slung my backpack over my shoulder and nudged the door open.

“Oh.” She looked up from her coffee in surprise, as though she had forgotten I was there all over again. “Bye, honey. I love you.”

“Love you too.” I frowned and ducked out of the door.

Crawford Middle wasn’t far from my house. Just twenty minutes on foot—twenty minutes of giant yards and generic white houses. I had retreaded the same route every day since elementary school and I still sometimes confused one block for another, they all looked so similar. But I didn’t enjoy my daily walk for the view.

As I made my way to the sidewalk, I closed my eyes, drew in a deep breath and felt my face relax into a smile. This time outside the confines of my room, but still entirely by myself, was the only chance I got to focus, undistracted, on the feel of the outside world.

Tuning in to the Hum, I could perceive more than a regular person could with all their senses. I could feel that the branches of the trees were still damp from last week’s rain even as the moisture retreated from their leaves in preparation for winter. I could feel that the Hamiltons had remembered to pick up yesterday’s mail. The Randalls hadn’t. The Franklins still hadn’t emptied their summer kiddie pool. Leaves were gathering on the stagnant water and the slide of their play structure. Without opening my eyes, I counted four cars parked on the near side of our street: two vans, a smaller sports car, and a pickup truck.

The late autumn air was just crisp enough to sharpen my focus, but not quite cold enough to numb it. I lived for that tipping point between seasons: the tail end of summer when the fringes of the leaves turned, or the last weeks of winter when snow melted into streams that etched rivulets through the dust and darkened the soil with the promise of life. If there was one thing I loved about living in this stupid little town—and there probably was just the one—it was getting to experience the four seasons in all their glory. In the wintertime, when the Wisconsin wind whipped needles of snow through the air and drove temperatures down below zero, Mama would offer to drive me to school, but I always refused. Twenty minutes of quality time with the outside world—even when it blustered, and wailed, and tried to bite my fingers off—was better than five stuck in a car trying to make conversation with my mother.

The wind, rain, and snow were my only real friends now that my grandpa was gone. He had been only human being I actually liked spending time with. When I was as young as four, he had started reading with me about Boudicca and Cleopatra, having me sound my way through the easy words and stopping to explain the hard ones. When I was six, the two of us had spent a summer restaging the rise and decline of Rome across a table-sized map with little horses and soldiers he had whittled himself. The next year, we had done the same thing with Napoleon’s conquest of Europe. My grandpa was the first person—the _only_ person—in my life who had made the world outside the Hum seem alive and full of wonders,

Even after he became too feeble to show me how to work his old guns or string a longbow, I had still loved sitting and listening to him talk about wars, and legends, and empires. During that last year, when he was too sick to carry on long conversations, I had sat near his bed and slowly read to him, like he had read to me when I was small. Even now, I still found myself thinking about him whenever I followed a river down a map or thumbed through the pages of a well-worn book—but I tried to push thoughts of my grandpa out of my head as I shoved my hands into the front pocket of my sweatshirt and opened my eyes to the sidewalk before me. Best not to have any thoughts in your head when heading to school.

When I reached Crawford, the bell was already ringing its deafening signal for the start of class and I had to hurry to be on time for English.

“Last week we read through the first half of King Henry IV, Part 1.” Ms. White droned, oblivious to the fact that absolutely no one was listening. “Now, does anyone remember some of the literary devices we talked about?” An awkward pause. “Who can tell me the difference between a metaphor and a simile?” Another pause. “That’s right,” Ms. White said when only the chatter of people’s side conversations answered her. “A simile is a comparison using the word ‘like’ and a metaphor is where you say that one thing _is_ another thing.”

She set about writing examples on the board, but most of the class’s attention was on the back corner of the room where Katie Whitman seemed to be on the verge of breaking up with Cameron West, again.

Personally, I was most interested in the catapult my classmate Drew was fashioning out of pencils, rubber bands, and the spiral binding pulled from his notebook. Drew was probably the closest thing to a friend I had at school—or anywhere, really. We exchanged the occasional amused glance at other peoples’ stupidity and sometimes had conversations about natural disasters and early vertebrates.

Drew, like me, was something of a slacker, though his case was significantly worse. The teachers had written him off as a failure because he slept in class, never turned in an assignment, and usually forgot to change his shirt from one day to the next. But none of them seemed to notice the amazing things he could do with just some stolen rubber bands and his imagination. They wouldn’t have guessed that he slept through most of math and science because he was already building rockets in his backyard.

“It needs a heavier base,” I commented, nodding at the catapult. “At least if you plan on shooting anything besides spitballs.”

“I know,” Drew muttered, adjusting one of the pencils. “I’m going to use my graphing calculator.”

“You don’t need that for math class?” I asked.

“No.”

Of course he didn’t. Drew was even better at mental math than I was.

“I think if I rubber band the whole thing to this part here—”

“And I’ll take that, Andrew,” Ms. White picked up Drew’s catapult, walking right past Katie and Cameron, who continued to entertain the rest of the class with their relationship problems.

“What’s the deal with you, Katie?” Cameron was saying as Ms. White deposited Drew’s creation in the trash and returned to the front of the room. “I mean, you don’t return any of my calls.”

“Ron-ron.” Katie put on a dramatic expression of distress. “I don’t know. Lately you’ve just been acting really…”

“Really what?” Cameron demanded.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she huffed.

“It’s not nothing. Tell me.”

“Well, you’ve just been really clingy. You know, I have a life! I’ve been really busy.”

Cameron frowned. “Too busy for me?”

I honestly didn’t know how Katie’s troop of concerned friends and the rest of the class could sit and listen to them without cracking up. They sounded completely ridiculous, yet everyone was tuning in with wide eyes like they were bearing witness to the most epic romance in history.

“And the necklace you got me for my birthday,” Katie whined, pushing her mouth into that girly pout she was so fond of. “You didn’t seriously think I’d like it, did you? It’s so obviously just a cheap—”

“Aw, come on, baby-doll.” Cameron reached out to touch her face.

“No, you know what Cameron?” She pulled away and said in a dramatic whisper, “This just isn’t working out!”

Her gaggle of girlfriends uttered a unified gasp.

“Katie, you don’t mean—”

“It’s _over_ , Ron-ron!” Katie pushed him away, and making sure the whole class heard her, shrieked, “It’s over!”  Standing up, she swished her long hair in Cameron’s face and marched away.

“Katie?” Ms. White said, finally forced to pause in her lecture. “What is the matter?”

“I can’t talk right now, okay?” Katie whimpered and fled into the hallway.

“Katie—wait—” Ms. White floundered. “Come back. You need a hall pass!”

“I need to see my counselor!” we all heard Katie wail, followed by her fading footsteps and a deluge of fake sobs.

Cameron, who happened to be one of our school’s thickest, angriest football players in addition to the male lead in our daily English class soap opera, kicked Katie’s empty chair into the wall before sinking into a deep sulk. While I was hardly fond of any of the popular kids, I had a special loathing for Cameron. Maybe it was because he was a touch dumber than the others. Or maybe it was because he was a bully. He bullied Drew.

One time Cameron stole Drew’s shoe and stuck it on top of the projector on the highest shelf in the room. Cameron was the tallest, most athletic kid in the class, so no one else had a hope of getting it down. Drew and a few other kids in the class embarrassed themselves trying, but none of them could jump high enough. I could. I could easily have leapt up and grabbed Drew’s shoe for him, but I didn’t. I was too afraid of the attention it would draw.

Eventually, Drew had to stand on two stacked chairs to get his shoe down while Cameron and company laughed at his expense. Of course, Ms. White walked in right as Drew was climbing down and he was the one who ended up getting in trouble.

I could justify not getting the shoe down for him; keeping my abilities a secret came before anything else. But I could have said something to Ms. White as she berated Drew, I could have told her what really happened. I hoped dimly that someone else in the class might speak up, but they didn’t. They were too afraid of becoming the next target of Cameron’s bullying—and I was too. Even though I had no right to be. I was the last person on Earth who should have been scared of a muscle-headed jock. I don’t remember ever hating myself so much as when I watched Ms. White send a dejected Drew to the principal’s office.

“I’m sorry,” I said when he got back from the office and slid into his seat beside me.

“For what?” he asked.

“Nothing… I’m just sorry.”

We were fortunate today that Cameron was too busy getting dumped to pick on anyone—although he was sure to take it out on _someone_ later.

“Isn’t that the second time this week they’ve broken up?” Drew asked as several people began giggling and Katie’s group of friends burst into frenzied whispers.

“Third,” I said. “Just wait. By the end of the day they’ll be in some corner with their faces glued together.”

Drew clasped his hands to his heart. “Such a beautiful love story.”

“A romance for the ages,” I agreed.

It took a full five minutes for the talking to die down. Then, of course, another wave of whispers and giggles swept through the class when Katie shuffled back into the room sniffing into a tissue and glaring at Cameron through intentionally smeared eyeliner. Eventually, Ms. White got most of the class to settle down to the inane worksheet she had prepared for us.

I had read a lot of Shakespeare after my grandpa died. It was in English, so it didn’t remind me quite so painfully of his voice as reading in French, but it was difficult like the literature we had read together. I enjoyed Shakespeare for the same reason most kids my age despised it: because it was like figuring out a new language. It was a challenge.

This worksheet Ms. White had devised was, of course, an insult to Shakespeare, plays, and the whole English language. I scribbled my way through it without bothering to glance at my copy of the play. Within a few minutes, I had reached the last question:

 

**Reread the last section carefully. Why does Hotspur lose his temper with his cousin, Glendower?**

 

_Because he’s Hotspur and that’s what he does. Also, you know Glendower isn’t actually Hotspur’s cousin, right? Hotspur just calls him that because he’s Mortimer’s father-in-law and Mortimer is his brother-in-law and that’s a polite familiar address. You reread the section._

 

I had just set down my pencil when there was a knock at the classroom door. Everyone looked up from their work to see an unfamiliar boy standing in the doorway.

And for the first time that day, the room was silent.

I think the thing that took everyone by surprise was his skin color. Except for a small handful of Asians, one Puerto Rican girl, and two black kids—one of whom I was pretty sure was still suspended for smoking in the bathroom—our little suburban middle school was as white as a box of Vanilla Wafers. So, on the rare occasions a brand new student wandered in, no one expected dark brown skin and eyes like live coals.

“Oh—hello,” Ms. White said, after she too had recovered from the initial awkward surprise. “You must be the new transfer student. They told me you would be coming. Um—welcome, welcome. Come on in.”

No one’s eyes left the newcomer as he took his first tentative steps into the room. Some of the girls uttered audible sighs. I had never been interested—or rather _let_ myself be interested—in boys. Boys were other people, and I made a point of avoiding those. But even I couldn’t take my eyes off of this one. At first, I couldn’t even say why. Maybe it was his skin. It wasn’t just dark; it was also warm and luminous, like there was sunlight shining on it, even indoors on this gray day. And the inexplicable light wasn’t contained to his skin. Every inch of him seemed to exude an ember-like glow. It wavered through his untidy hair and pulsed out of his black eyes…

“Welcome,” Ms. White said again as the boy reached the front of the room. “Welcome to first-hour English.”

It was clear from the uneasy way the boy held himself that he was keenly aware of all the eyes on him. There was something weird about the way he walked too. It was light and fluid, almost effortless—like something not quite human.

“Do you speak English?” Ms. White asked.

“Uh… English?” the boy said blankly, causing Cameron and a few other jerks in the class to snicker.

“I am Ms. White,” Ms. White said slowly, pointing to herself. “Can you say that? Ms. Whi—”

“Oh. Yeah, hi,” the boy said with barely a trace of an accent. “Nice to meet you.”

“Oh,” Ms. White fumbled, her face going instantly red. “Oh, y-yes, it’s—we’re all very happy to meet you too.”

Drew chuckled under his breath. “ _Aww_ kward.”

A flustered Ms. White pushed her glasses up on her nose and changed the subject. “And what did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t.” The boy shoved his hands into his pockets, where they twisted nervously. “I’m Daniel… Daniel Thundyil.”

“And can you tell us where you’re from, Daniel?” Ms. White asked.

“Oh. Y-yeah.” The boy fidgeted. “I can do that. I’m…” His brow furrowed for a moment. “I’m from… um… Sanada?”

A few people in the class exchanged confused glances.

“You mean Canada?” Drew piped up after a moment.

“Yeah.” Daniel snapped his fingers. “Yeah, that’s the one.”

“Okay.” Ms. White eyed the new boy in bewilderment for a moment and then seemed to decide that she hadn’t subjected him to enough awkwardness. “How about you tell us something about yourself,” she suggested, “so your classmates can get to know you.”

“Something about me?”

“It can be anything. What’s a hobby of yours?”

“I…” He thought for a moment. “I like dancing.”

That drew snorts of laughter from Cameron and some of the other football players. So, it had taken the new kid all of thirty seconds to make himself a target for the school’s most prolific bullies. Great job, new kid.

“Oh, really?” Ms. White said as though she didn’t hear them. “What kind of dance?”

“I don’t know.” Daniel shrugged with a smile. “Just dance.”

“He’s a ballerina!” Cameron guffawed, setting off a whole chorus of cruel laughter.

Daniel, however, looked more confused than embarrassed as he stood in front of our class full of terrible hyenas.

 “Well, Daniel,” Ms. White said as the laughter faded into chuckles. “This is our only open spot at the moment.” She pulled out the chair opposite mine. “This will be your assigned seat now.”

“Okay. Thanks.” Daniel sat down, again with that swift, fluid grace that was so unlike any movement I had ever seen.

“Now.” Ms. White crossed back to the board. “As I was saying, dramatic irony is when the audience knows something that the characters don’t know.”

“Hi,” I said, offering Daniel a smile.

“Hi.” He returned the smile and it glowed—to the point where I could swear it created physical warmth.

Usually I didn’t initiate conversations, but I found myself wanting to make an exception here. I knew what it was like to be a new kid at a school. And when I had moved into the district, I had at least had the good fortune not to be the target of Cameron’s idiotic taunts. I might not be ready to stand up to bullies for this kid, but I could at least be a friendly face.

“I’m Joan,” I said.

“Yeah.” Daniel fiddled distractedly with the zipper of his jacket. “I’m—” He paused, sniffing sharply. Then he ducked his head under the table. I heard a loud “Ah- _choo_!” and felt a bewildering wash of heat against my knees. Before I had had a chance to contemplate the sensation, Daniel had straightened back up in his seat. “I’m Daniel.”

“Right, and you said your last name was Thundyil?”

“Yeah.”

“I—um, I think I live down the block from the house you just moved into,” I said.

“Oh. Really?”

“Yeah. You met my mom yesterday.”

“Oh yeah. I think I remember her,” Daniel said. “She was nice.” He paused for a moment, looking me up and down. “You look like her.”

“Really?” Hardly anyone ever said I looked like Mama. She was so much prettier than I was.

“Yeah. Except for the eyes.” He gestured at my face. “Hers aren’t quite so…”

“I know,” I looked down, self-conscious. “Mine are weird.”

“No, no,” Daniel said earnestly. “I mean—” He plunged under the table again and there was that burst of heat again as he sneezed, “— _choo_!—” and then bobbed back up. “I mean, I guess they are a little weird. But they’re cool.”

“Oh.” I felt my face going pink. “Thanks.”

My eyes were the only part of my appearance I genuinely liked. I had inherited my father’s milky-pale skin and square jaw along with Mama’s light brown hair and slightly upturned nose. But my eyes were a different story. Instead of brown like my father’s or hazel like Mama’s, they had come out violently, inexplicably blue. Brought to an almost sapphire intensity in some light, they were the only part of my appearance that came close to reflecting how unique I was on the inside.

“Freaky, aren’t they?” Drew said as he dug for more rubber bands in his pocket and began work on another catapult.

“Yeah.” Daniel leaned forward to peer at me and I thought I felt the air grow warmer. “A little bit.” He stuck his head under the table again. “ _Choo_!”

“Allergies?” Drew asked sympathetically.

“Yeah. Or something like—” he dove for cover once more. “ _Choo_!” And this time I was sure I felt heat brushing my leg. Did regular sneezes usually scald like that? “Something like that.”

“Why do you keep doing that?” Drew asked.

“Doing what?”

“Putting your head under the table.”

“I don’t know,” Daniel said quickly. “I don’t have to tell you. I just feel like it.”

Drew gave him a strange look. “Okay, weirdo.”

As Ms. White droned on about archetypes and allegories, I surveyed the weirdo again—from his faintly wavy black hair, to his expressive black eyes, to the slightly lighter skin on his palms—and found that I couldn’t begin to place his race. His hair seemed far too fine and straight for someone of his deep brown skin color. Maybe he was half African American and half something else? Maybe he was Indian? Or Hispanic? Nothing I could think of seemed to fit.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Uh…” Daniel stiffened slightly. “Canada.”

“Well, I know you came from Canada,” I said, a little amused. “I just wondered what your ethnic background was. Like, where’s your dad from?”

“Oh, that. Um…” His gaze passed momentarily over the map of the world tacked to the bulletin board. He tilted his head, squinting. “Ch—Chi—na? My parents were from China.”

Drew looked up from the literary devices worksheet he had been ripping into neat strips. “Dude, no offense but you don’t look Chinese at all.”

“Andrew,” Ms. White said sharply. “Will you please stop disrupting class? We don’t have much time to get through the rest of these—”

Sadly for her, she was interrupted by the bell.

“Oh.” Daniel jumped at the near-deafening noise as the rest of the class started packing up their books. “That’s a terrible sound,” he grimaced.

“You think?” I said dryly.

“And that—that means class is over?”

“Yeah,” I said. “What else would it mean?”

“I um… I don’t know where I’m supposed to go next.”

“You have a schedule?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. They gave me that.” Daniel reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. “I just can’t um… I mean—I’m not really sure how to—”

“Can I see it?” I asked.

He unfolded the paper and handed it to me.

“Well, you have music with Mr. Hager next,” I said, looking over the schedule. “So do I. You can just follow me there.”

“Oh.” He looked relieved as I handed the paper back to him. “Good. Thanks.”

Our school had a pretty dumb way of organizing music class. There was strings class and band class. Kids with lessons in a specific instrument got placed in one or the other based on that and everyone else just got thrown in wherever there was space, regardless of their preferences.

“So, from your schedule, it looks like you got placed in strings class,” I said. “Do you play the violin, viola, bass, cello?”

“Those are… musical instruments?” Daniel asked.

“Yes,” I said, confused.

“Do you hit them?”

“ _No_. You definitely don’t.”

“Oh. Then I can’t play them.”

Oh God. I was less and less sure this guy was actually from Canada—or this planet.

When we got to strings, our ancient, partially deaf teacher, Mr. Hager, did with Daniel what he did with anyone new to the class: he threw him in the always shorthanded viola section.

“I— um—I don’t play—” Daniel began, but Mr. Hager didn’t hear him.

“Go ahead and pull any of the unmarked violas off the back shelves,” Mr. Hager said. “Any one is fine. Just make sure it’s got all four strings on it.”

“But I have no idea how to play a—a viola,” Daniel protested, only to be completely ignored as Mr. Hager started fumbling around for the baton Drew had just stolen off his stand. “I don’t know how to play _any_ of these.”

“It’s okay,” I said, deciding that someone had to come to Daniel’s rescue, “neither do most of the people in this class.”

“But I don’t even know which ones are violas,” Daniel said helplessly looking around at the shelves of instrument cases.

“They’re the ones that are smaller than the cellos but bigger than the violins.”

“Th-the what?”

“Okay, here, I’ll show you.” I led him to the shelf of spare violins and violas while the rest of the class took out their instruments and started to tune.

“Wow…” Daniel looked around the room as it filled with the sound of greasy bows dragging across cheap strings. “Everyone here plays these instruments?”

“Using the verb ‘play’ loosely, yes.”

“Even, like, the athletes?”

“Yeah,” I said, “some of them. Is that weird?”

“Um—no. No, I-I guess not,” he said, though he still looked intensely confused.

“Here.” I took one of the unassigned violas off the shelf and opened up the case for him. “You can take this one. The other violas will show you what to do with it. Or not. They’re not very good, but as long as you pretend to play a little bit, you’ll be fine.”

Daniel looked down at the instrument warily, like it was a snake that might bite him if he got too close.

“Go on,” I said. “Take it.”

“I-I can’t.” He took a step back. “This is too weird. I’m not—I-I mean I can’t… I can’t touch that.”

“Of course you can,” I said, completely mystified by his behavior. “Just grab it by the neck like this.” I wrapped a hand around the viola’s neck and lifted it from its case. “Then pick up the bow by the wood part like this and make sure your fingers don’t touch the horse hair.”

“Horse hair?” Daniel repeated, his eyes widening as though I’d just told him the thing was strung with unicorn hair. “That’s real horse hair?”

“Yes,” I said slowly. “What else would it be?”

“Wow.” He reached out like he wanted to feel it.

“Hey!” I pulled the bow back. “I just said you’re not supposed to touch that part.”

“Oh—sorry.”

“Just hold it by the stick part like I’m doing.” I held the bow out to him.

An incredulous something like a laugh huffed out of him. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why?” I demanded. “Are you allergic to wood or something?”

“No—I—”

“Joan, Daniel,” Mr. Hager said impatiently, “why aren’t you two at your stands yet?”

“Just take it,” I hissed and pushed the instrument into Daniel’s hands.

“Oh—!” He fumbled, as though he wanted to push it away, but faced with the choice of either taking it or letting it fall to the floor, he finally closed his hands around it. “O-okay…” He looked almost panicked, as though I had just put a live grenade in his hands. “Okay.”

Mr. Hager gave Daniel the day’s sheet music and stuck him in the back of the viola section, telling him to “just try and follow along.” Mr. Hager’s idea of teaching was to assign people parts, put the sheet music in front of them, and then yell at them (increasingly louder as his hearing went) when it all sounded terrible.

Strings class at Crawford made me incalculably grateful for my five years of cello lessons. Aside from the two violinists that carried their entire section, I was the only person in the class who was any good at their instrument—and I was very good. Of all the lessons Papa had signed me up for when I was little, cello was the only activity I had really taken to. Cello was perfect. I liked the way it engaged my entire body, from the base of my spine to the tips of my fingers. I liked the way the long, powerful sounds resonated all the way down to my core. Playing the cello was as close as I could get to the feeling of the Hum without using my powers. And as long as I pretended the rest of the class didn’t exist, strings class was the one part of the school day I actually enjoyed.

But today I was distracted, barely paying attention as we laid into the first measures of Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Daniel was sitting in his seat, out of the way, alternately looking from the squeaking first violins, to the sleeping second violins, to the basses, to the cellos, to the other violas in front of him, and cautiously turning his own viola over in his hands like it might blow up. What was the matter with him? What kind of person had never seen a viola before? Had he moved here from a cave? Or was he actually from outer space?

Halfway through the class’s attempt at a Stravinsky suite, Daniel paused abruptly in the middle of trying to peer into one of the viola’s sound holes. He sniffed once, twice, and a look of panic overtook him. Dumping the viola back into its case, he twisted around in his seat and—“ _Choo_!”

He turned away from the class and buried his face in the crook of his arm, but I saw it. For just a moment, I saw bright hot sparks burst from his mouth. They flared orange for a heartbeat before he smothered them against his arm, but I had seen. My bow stopped on the strings, my mouth dropping open as reality ground to a halt.

Fire.

He was sneezing fire.

 


	4. Tajaka

Fire was not an easy thing to control.

It had taken me years to work up to it and I hadn’t even entertained the idea until long after I started exploring my other powers. For that whole first year of practice, my abilities had been limited to moving air, water, and various solid items where I wanted them to go. As I had gotten older, I had grown in intelligence and self-control, and my abilities had become more nuanced.

Rather than just levitating a metal object or nudging it from one place to another, I learned to shape the metal itself, twisting pennies into corkscrews, tying nails in knots, and crunching paper clips into solid nuggets of steel. I extended my power over air so that I could not only push air away from me with my hands, but suck it in towards me, creating a vacuum that could close a door from across a room or pull light objects within reach. Water, for all the grief it had given me at the beginning, became an intimate friend of mine. I taught myself to reach deep into the substance and control its individual molecules. I got so good at manipulating those little particles that, with a flick of my fingers, I could make them burst apart into vapor—or the reverse, drawing the water molecules in the air together to make a droplet or a small puddle. Every day, I found some new small thing I could do with my powers.

By the time I turned nine, I had become aware that the temperature sometimes fluctuated with my moods. Apathy, determination, disdain, and deep calm could make the air around my cold. An excess of heart-pumping emotions like rage, anxiety, or elation could drive the heat up. At ten, I started to control those changes in temperature, heating or cooling my body with a careful combination of focus and emotion.

For my early experimentation with temperature change, I practiced on water. I would fill a bucket from the garage and sneak it up to my room. Then, at night, after my parents had gone to sleep, I would perch on the edge of my bed with both hands and a thermometer submerged in the bucket and try to drive the water temperature up and down. At first, all my effort could only get the bright red line in the thermometer to move a few degrees at a time. But after two months of practice, I could make the temperature soar and plunge at will.

The dicey thing about messing with temperature was that, in order to heat or cool water, I had to first bring my own body—or at least my hands—to the desired temperature. No human body should have been able to withstand the extreme temperature changes but, mysteriously enough, my skin, bones, and blood vessels seemed to be adapted to cope with it. Sure, the first few times I succeeded in forming ice crystals in the water, I gave myself minor frostbite, but after some experimentation, I found a solution. If I kept my fingers flexing in time with my heartbeat, I could keep just enough blood circulating through them to prevent my own flesh from freezing.

Heating water was scarier. I must have lost my nerve and pulled my hands out of the bucket a hundred times before I hit that 212-degree boiling point. When I finally managed it, I was rewarded with skin-pinching blisters all over my hands. As painful as they were, the burns took only a few days to heal. When they cleared up, the skin where they had been was tougher than before, and the next time I tentatively tried boiling water, I found that my hands had become impervious to heat all the way up to a few hundred degrees. I had made myself burn-proof.

By my eleventh birthday, I had all the ingredients I needed to make fire. I could bring my fingers to several hundred degrees without damaging them. My molecular-level control of water allowed me to extract the moisture from my skin, making it bone dry. With my speed, I had no doubt that I could move my fingers against one another fast enough to strike up a spark. Most importantly, I could already feel fire in the world around me. It had begun to Hum to me.

My senses jumped when Mama tried to strike a match against the side of our worn-out matchbox. I felt it spark once, twice, and then blaze to life with a triumphant hiss. Even though I couldn’t see the flame, I could feel its dancing pull from across the kitchen—as fluid as water, as light as air, as distinct as metal, but more alive than any of them.

“Keep your eyes closed,” Mama reminded me.

I did, but I sensed her bring the match to the tip of each of the eleven birthday candles. I felt each flame as it leapt to life. By the time Mama set the cake down in front of me, the dancing pinpricks of fire were as distinct to me as the silverware laid out on the table. They pulled at me playfully, inviting me to dance with them.

“Open your eyes,” Mama said.

I did and found every candle exactly where I had known it would be. I took a deep breath and eleven little flames leaned in toward me.

“Make a wish,” Mama reminded me.

I made the same wish I had made every year since I was seven— _I wish for answers_ —and I blew out the candles.

I hadn’t had a party, since it had only been a few months since my grandpa died and nobody in my family felt much like celebrating—not that I had any friends to invite anyway. The only presents I had gotten had been from my parents: a twenty-dollar bill from Papa, and from Mama, a pretty dress she was vainly hoping I might wear to school. All in all, it was one of my lousier birthdays. That was why I decided that, at the very least, I was going to get one present worth having: I was going to teach myself to control fire.

I was uneasy about the idea of making fire, but my heart was still full of the quiet creak of my grandpa’s voice, and I knew what he would tell me.

“Jeanne,” he would say, taking my chin in his hand, “what do I always tell you? Fear is an enemy dressed up as a friend. Humor it as far as it keeps you safe, but don’t you ever let it get in the way of what you want to be.” And I wanted to be brave enough to tame fire. I had wanted that ever since I first felt a flame tugging at my senses.

Knowing that fire would be hotter than boiling water, I purposely burned my hands on our gas stove to build up my tolerance. The pain was so bad I could barely think. I spent the three days following my birthday alternately crying and roaring into my pillow while the burns healed.

The skin that grew back over my palms felt strange. Despite being thicker than regular human skin, it wasn’t rough like callouses or leathery and stiff like the soles of feet. It had a smooth, elastic feel all its own. Once I had my new superhuman skin, I shut myself up in my room with three big buckets of water—just in case—and set to work.

I had suspected that generating fire bare-handed would be hard, that it wouldn’t come with the first snap of my fingers. What I hadn’t realized was just how much work was ahead of me. For three days, I drove the blood in my hands past the boiling point and struck my hands together again, and again, and again. The first hundred—thousand—tries, all I got were puffs of smoke and sparks that fell, sputtering, into the water. But I could feel the flame there, just a well-timed spark away, just out of reach, so I kept going. I rubbed my hands together until my muscles wore out and my tough burn-proof skin was raw and cracking.

When I finally managed a flame on that third day, it was terrifying. The fire burst from my hands too fast—fueled by all the madness and frustration of three whole days of effort. Terrified, I screamed and plunged my hands into the bucket before the flames got the chance to flare out of control.

As steam hissed from the bucket, I found myself shaking. I didn’t know why—if it was from relief, or shock, or exhaustion. Maybe the cold water was finally bringing out the pain of days and days of needle-sharp sparks and relentless abrasion. Maybe it was just that, after all that struggle, those few seconds of fire had been the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Whatever the reason, I put my forehead to the rim of the bucket and started to cry.

Producing fire brought all the exhilaration I had hoped, but it changed something in the way I thought of my powers, darkened it. Unlike metal, air, and water, fire had a mind of its own. Of all the things I could control, it was the only one that could turn back and bite me if I wasn’t careful. And if it did bite back, if it broke out of my control, I didn’t know if I would be able to contain it.

I decided, as I knelt there with my arm elbow-deep in that bucket of water and tears dribbling down my face, that I would only ever make fire in small amounts and only with a water source nearby. (That was when I moved the fishbowl into my room). Now, at thirteen, I had excellent control over all my powers, but I was still cautious whenever I struck up a flame.

Fire wasn’t an easy thing to control.

It certainly wasn’t something you casually sneezed into the crook of your arm in the middle of strings class.

 

**……..**

 

I was the only one who saw Daniel lift his head and clamp a hand down on the glowing embers still clinging to the sleeve of his jacket. I was the only one who saw him sniff and glance around to make sure no one had noticed. And I was frozen there, mid-bow, as the rest of the class continued to muddle through Stravinsky all around me.

The gears in my own head screeched louder than my classmates’ strings as I tried to process what I had just seen. I didn’t know of any conditions that caused people to sneeze fire—and I would know. I had researched every mutation and medical condition that could possibly be related to my powers, including all documented cases of spontaneous human combustion. The only other case that even remotely resembled that sneeze was my own ability to produce fire.

Okay, I had never accidentally coughed or sneezed flames, but there were other aspects of my power that could jump out involuntarily if I wasn’t careful, like my pull on metals. One night, I had hiccupped and popped half the springs in my mattress. Another time, I had exploded an overhead light when a spider ran across my hand.

Could it be…? No. No, I couldn’t let my thoughts go there. I shouldn’t let myself hope that. But I was unable to crush the desperate thought as it flickered to life inside me. Could this be the day? Could I have found someone like me?

To my annoyance, Daniel managed not to sneeze for the rest of the class. He stuck it out, perched uneasily on the edge of his chair, staring down at the viola he had dropped haphazardly into its case, unaware of my eyes on him. When Mr. Hager wrapped up our last piece, I put my cello away as fast as I could and hurried to help Daniel pack up the dreaded viola, hoping to check him for any evidence of the flames I was certain I had seen.

“Hey, thanks,” he said as I loosened the bow and slid it into its place in the case.

“No problem.” I leaned in a little closer than necessary to pick up the viola, scanning his sleeve for burn marks or ash. But his jacket was black and I couldn’t make anything out.

“Is everything okay?” Daniel asked as I straightened up, frowning.

“You smell like smoke,” I commented.

“What? Oh yeah,” Daniel sighed and his breath made a hot ripple in the air. “I guess I probably do.”

“Do you smoke?” I asked.

“Um… yeah.”  

“You know, you’ll get expelled if they catch you.” Well, if you were Katie—or even Drew—you got a slap on the wrist and a suspension, but they had expelled an African American kid for smoking my first year.

“Oh—well, um—I don’t actually smoke,” Daniel said, scratching the back of his neck. “It’s um—it’s my aunt. I was just at her house.”

God, he was a terrible liar.

“Okay,” Daniel said once we had put the viola back on its shelf. “Now I just have to figure out what my next class is.” He reached into his pocket for his schedule.

“It’s science, with Drew and me,” I said.

“Oh—really? Cool.”     

“And after that, you have Spanish in Room 277 with Ms. Parker. I have history on the other end of the hall, but Drew can show you—assuming he sticks around that long. He usually skips out around fourth hour.”

“ _Xuuse_ , how do you know all that?” Daniel asked.

“You showed me your schedule.”

“Yeah, for, like, two  _dinmanu_. You remembered all of that just from one look?”

“I remember everything I read,” I said, choosing not to comment on the foreign words that seemed to be dropping into his sentences.

“Whoa.” Daniel looked impressed. “Can a lot of people on this—in this town do that?”

“Not like I can,” I smiled.

“That’s amazing,” Daniel said earnestly. “That’s like a superpower!”

“Thanks.” I felt my dry smirk widen into a genuine smile.

Most people either called me a nerd or just didn’t care when I demonstrated my mental capacity. It was also a little amusing that this guy who seemed to be able to shoot fire from his mouth considered memorization, of all things, a superpower.

It was lab day in science, so Mr. Lang had the class break into groups. Katie and a couple of other girls were eyeing Daniel for their group, but I swooped in before they got the chance and guided him to the back table with Drew and me. The move earned me some nasty looks from a few of the popular girls who otherwise never bothered to glance in my direction, but I decided it was worth the unwanted attention. I wasn’t letting Daniel out of my sight until I figured out his deal.

As Drew showed an intent Daniel how to turn on the Bunsen burner and set our beaker of water, salt, and sand to boil above it, I observed Daniel’s hands. I had clearly seen him smash an open palm into the live sparks on his sleeve. But as he straightened out the tripod for Drew and I got a look at the insides of his hands, I didn’t see any signs of burning.

The fire-sneezes, I reasoned,  _could_  just be a rare condition I had somehow never heard of. But if Daniel’s skin was adapted to deal with that fire, that meant he was built differently from other people, inside and out. It meant he was like me. He had sneezed the flames directly into his arm, but that jacket looked tough and might protected his arm from the heat, so that wasn’t a great indication of his fire resistance. Then he had put out those sparks without burning himself. Did  _that_  mean his skin was fireproof? Maybe, but maybe not. There were regular people with thick callouses and high pain tolerance who could snuff out cigarettes on their palms and pinch out candles without flinching.

If I was going to be sure, I had to see Daniel’s bare skin come into contact with something hotter than a couple of tiny sparks. Maybe if I spilled something on his jacket so he had to take it off and then waited for him to sneeze again—but, no, we were back in a room with tables. He could easily duck out of sight if he needed to. And besides, the sneezing seemed to have died down for now. Inconvenient. How long was I going to have to wait for another clue? Normally I was a pretty patient person, but if I didn’t figure this out soon—now—it was going to drive me insane!

After several minutes of clicking my pen in agitation, I felt my eyes drift from Daniel to rest on our Bunsen burner, its blue flame blazing at a steady thousand-some degrees… No, Joan, no, the stern, sane part of my brain tried to interject before the thought got a chance to form. That’s dangerous. That is way too dangerous. Drew is right there. The whole class might see.

But Drew already had second degree burns from when he got bored last year and set off one of his rockets in the boys’ bathroom. I was sure he would forgive me. And I didn’t care about the rest of the class. I had to know. I had to…

Before I could lose my nerve, I tipped my lab stool forward, balancing atop it on one knee like more careless students often did when they wanted to reach something across the table. Then, at just the right moment, I ‘accidentally’ lost my balance, my knee slipping off the stool as it fell to the floor, pitching me forward.

“Whoops!” I pushed my forearm into the Bunsen burner, sweeping the entire operation off the lab table, beaker, tripod, and all.

“Whoa!” Drew, like a normal person, leapt back from the falling equipment.

But Daniel darted forward, catching the Bunsen burner in one hand and the boiling beaker in the other without spilling a drop of its contents.

My eyes widened for a moment in sheer amazement at his reflexes. Then they flicked to his face, searching for a wince, a flinch, any indication that the scalding hot glass and metal had affected him in the slightest.

But there was only a nervous smile on that face as Daniel laughed, “Careful,” and set the equipment back on the table.

“Dude!” Drew gasped, still backed up against the sinks. “Didn’t that hurt your hands?”

“What? Oh.” Daniel glanced down at his hands then quickly clutched them to the front of his shirt so we couldn’t see them. “Yeah,” he said even though he didn’t look like he was in even the tiniest bit of pain. “Yeah, actually, that—ouch. That really hurts. Ouch. I just—delayed reaction,” he laughed nervously. “I’m just going to go see the nurse or something.” And he hurried out of the classroom, drawing a few confused looks as he went.

“Does he even know where the nurse’s office is?” Drew asked after a moment.

“Probably not,” I said, righting my stool. “I’m going to go make sure he gets there okay.”

“But—”

“Just tell Mr. Lang where we are if he asks. Thanks, Drew,” and I sped out of the classroom before he could protest.

I didn’t see Daniel when I stepped out into the hall. Fortunately, the science classroom was right at the end of the third-floor hallway, so there was only one way he could have gone. As I made my way past the closed doors of a few classrooms, I heard Daniel’s voice murmuring from one of the stairwells.

“Hi? Hello? Hi?”

I crept closer as quietly as I could until I was right around the corner by the abstinence posters, just out of sight of the stairwell.

“Yeah,” I heard Daniel say, more clearly now, although he was trying to speak in a low voice. “Hi,  _Pita_. It’s me. Wow, this phone is a piece of  _xuro_. Koli wasn’t kidding when he said this place was behind with technology.” There was a pause as a deeper voice on the other end of the phone said something I couldn’t make out. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll tell you how it’s going: it sucks. Dad, I’m serious, this is impossible! You have to get me out of here! I don’t think I can do this.” Another pause. “I know. I know, I’m trying, but they’re so weird. They tried to make me play this wooden string thingy.” Pause. “Yeah. This wooden, hollow sort of  _soku_  thing with a pulley stick thing made of horse hair.  _Horse_   _hair_ , Dad! Where did they even get a—what? No… no, it turned out okay… No, I covered. But I keep sneezing and—what?... Yeah. Yeah, I’m calm. I’m totally calm. Okay, but  _Pita_ …  _Pita_? Dad?”

There was an irritated sigh and then a rustle as Daniel presumably shoved the phone back into his pocket. “Stupid phone.” I heard his footsteps coming back up the stairs and quietly took a deep breath.

He turned the corner and— “ _Ah_!” He jumped in surprise. “Joan! Wh-what—how long were you—I mean, wh-what are you doing here?”

“I was going to help you find the nurse’s office,” I said pleasantly, “but I see you’re all better.” I nodded down at his hands, which were now clearly visible and clearly not burned.

“Oh.” Daniel looked down at his hands, made to hide them again, and then seemed to realize it wouldn’t help. “Um… Th-this isn’t what it—I can explain—”

“I saw you sneezing fire in strings class,” I said, unable to hold back a triumphant smile, “and now I know heat doesn’t hurt you. You’re going tell me why.”

“What?” Daniel said weakly.

“It’s okay,” I added at the look of horror on his face. “I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”

“T-tell anyone what?” Daniel stuttered helplessly. “I don’t—I don’t know what you’re—”

“Seriously!” I almost yelled in exasperation. “I caught you! You can stop lying. You’re not any good at it anyway.”

“Whoa… okay. Ouch.”

“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “That was mean. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Daniel said. “My dad makes fun of me about it all the time. But this…” he looked at me with a grimace. “Yeah, this is bad.”

“You don’t have to worry,” I assured him. “I just said I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“That’s—I mean, don’t get me wrong, that’s a nice thought and I appreciate it, but you’re really not supposed to have seen anything at all.”

“Okay, but to be fair, that’s not my fault. You were doing a terrible job keeping it a secret.”

“It was fooling everyone else,” Daniel muttered sullenly.

“Only because everyone else is an idiot. I knocked over that Bunsen burner right in the middle of class to see if you would catch it and Drew’s the only one who actually—”

“You did that on purpose?” Daniel exclaimed in horror. “Falleke, don’t you know you could hurt yourself doing that?”

“Well, that’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about,” I said. “I—”

“No.” Daniel was shaking his head. “No, we can’t talk about this. We really can’t. I have to go.” He made to move around me, but I stepped to the side, blocking his way.

“You’re not going anywhere until you explain the fire thing to me.”

“Sorry, but yes I am.” Daniel moved again, this time surprisingly fast, dodging around me like a basketball player ducking around an opponent.

But he wasn’t the only one with superhuman speed on his side. I stumbled, caught off guard, but in a moment, I managed to put myself in front of him again, barring his way down the hall with a hand slammed against one of the lockers.

“Whoa.” He blinked in surprise. “You’re  _fast_  for an adyn!”

“For a what?”

“I mean—for a… white… person. That sounds bad. Or maybe it doesn’t.” He paused, thinking for a moment. “No—I’m confused.”

“Oh yeah? Join the club. Now, about that fire—”

“Look, I’m sorry, Joan, but you really need to just forget what you saw and pretend nothing happened.”

“No.” I had been pretending these powers didn’t exist for years. Now a possible answer was standing in front of me and I was not going to let that go. I didn’t care if I had to wrestle him to the ground. I was going to get an explanation. “I’m not leaving you alone until you talk.”

“Sorry.” He started to turn away.

“Hey.” This time I reached out and grabbed hold of his wrist. It was warm and surprisingly solid under my fingers. “Running isn’t going to do you any good.” I could outrun anyone in the world. “You’re not going to be able to get away from me.”

“Oh yeah?” Daniel’s face broke into a smirk. “Wanna bet?”

Faster than I had ever seen a human being move, he ducked down and spun free of my grip. Before I could figure out exactly how his wrist had slipped out of my fingers, he had shot back toward the stairwell.

“Hey—wait!” I scrambled after him, ready to take the stairs ten at a time to catch him. But Daniel didn’t bother with stairs at all. As I raced around the corner and leapt down the steps to the first landing, he took hold of the hand rail and kicked his legs up in an acrobatic flip that sent him straight over the bar.

My eyes widened in horror and the whole world stopped for a moment. That was a three-story drop. He was dead. He had to be. But when I lurched up against the rail to look over, I saw Daniel spring gracefully off the edge of one of the staircases halfway down and turn one last flip, neatly avoiding every piece of protruding metal and concrete in his way, before landing in a light crouch on the ground floor. As my mouth fell open in disbelief, he straightened up, threw me a friendly wave goodbye, and took off down the first floor hallway.

“Mr. Lang’s going to mark you absent!” I shouted down the stairwell, but he was already gone.

I stood alone with my back against the lockers for a long time. This confirmed everything I had suspected. Daniel was fireproof like me, strong like me, solid like me. He was just like me, except that he was better—dumb as a dodo bird, maybe—but so much better with his abilities.

I couldn’t stop replaying his crazy handstand-flip over the stair rail in my head. Those were physical abilities like mine, but trained. He had practiced with his strength and speed in ways that I never had. That meant he must have had some place to use his powers, someone to teach him. I remembered what I had heard of his phone conversation with his father. Daniel had a parent who knew about his powers, maybe even had powers himself, someone who could help him and guide him, like a real parent was supposed to.

The idea created an aching feeling inside me, a longing so deep it sank its claws right into my core. It was agony. Choking, I clenched my fists and felt the locker door start to crunch in on itself with the force of the contracting knot of emotion. I needed to calm down, before my powers broke out of control and did serious damage. I squeezed my eyes shut.  _Focus, Joan._   _You have something to do. You have answers to find._

 _Focus_.

I let myself slide down the warped locker door until I was sitting on the ground, letting out a single loosening breath. The strain left my body and the metal behind me as my fists unclenched. The pain was still there, just muted, stowed deep beneath the surface where it belonged.

Intent on distracting myself from the lingering ache, I set about reviewing what I had just seen, trying to make as much sense of it as I could. My brief interaction with Daniel might have confirmed my suspicions about the fire, but it also raised a mountain of new questions: if Daniel was my age and had had his powers all this time, why was he so terrible at hiding them? He came off as though he had never tried to conceal his powers from anyone—in fact, I was certain he never had. How else could he possibly be so bad at it?

But that left the question of where on Earth he had come from. The way he moved and acted suggested that he had grown up in a place where he didn’t need to hide his abilities from other people, where he had the freedom to run, and grow, and sneeze as he liked. But there was no such place, was there?

_Was there?_

I stood up, hungry for answers, and I didn’t care what I had to do; I was going to get them.

 

........

 

Daniel didn’t come back to science class and I didn’t have any other classes with him, so I spent the rest of the day thinking, planning my next move. Obviously trying to corner him and demand an answer had been a mistake. I was going to have to take a more tactful approach, give him a reason to tell me what I wanted to know.

I must have turned over a hundred different approaches and scenarios by the end of sixth period. But eventually, I realized there was just no way around it; I was going to have to do the one thing I had sworn I would never, never do. Because why should he trust me with his secrets if I wasn’t willing to trust him with mine?

I caught Daniel again after the last bell of the day. He hadn’t told me his locker number, but I kept them all in my head and I knew there were only four empty lockers in the school. Lockers 122 and 141 were on the sixth-grade-only floor, and 207 still had a broken door, so that left only one possibility and, sure enough, when I wandered over to that end of the second floor hallway, I saw Daniel packing up his books at locker number 265.

He wasn’t exactly difficult to spot. His face was the only dark one in a sea of white kids. I, on the other hand, could move through the crowd toward his locker completely unnoticed.

When I drew closer, I had to roll my eyes. Katie was standing at his shoulder, batting her eyelashes as he took out his textbooks. She barely had any hips to speak of, but she had thrust one of them out as far as it would go as she leaned against the locker beside his.

“Hi,” she said in the same artificially sweet voice she used around all boys. She must have decided that going after the mysterious new guy was a good way to get back at Cameron for… whatever he had done to get dumped this time. Or maybe she actually thought Daniel was cute. Either way, it was gross. “You’re Daniel, right?”

“Oh,” Daniel said, seeming to notice her for the first time. “Yeah. That’s me.”

“I’m Katie.” She moved a little closer to him.

“Yeah. You’re in two of my classes,” Daniel said, stuffing his English book into his backpack. I noticed that he had managed to cram all four of his textbooks into his bag along with two binders and some notebooks.

“So,” Katie said, still grabbing persistently at his attention, “Where did you say you were from, Daniel?”

“I—um—Canada, or China, or whatever,” Daniel said, seizing the zipper of his bag and forcing it closed.

“China, huh?” Katie said, sliding herself in closer. “That’s really interesting.”

I hung back until Katie’s friends called to her to hurry up before she missed the bus. Then I moved up beside Daniel’s locker. He didn’t realize I was there until I cleared my throat.

 “ _Ahh_!” He jumped, slamming his locker shut in surprise. “You!”

“Me,” I smiled as Daniel backed up against the locker door, his overstuffed backpack clutched to his chest, his eyes darting around like a trapped animal’s.

 “Relax,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “I’m still not planning on telling anyone what I saw. I’m not even going to try to force you to tell me anything, I just want to show you something.”

He eyed me suspiciously. “Show me something?”

“Yes. Just not here.” I gestured at the people all around us. “In private. There’s a classroom on the third floor no one ever uses. It’ll only take a second. I just need you to follow me.”

“Okay, you know how sketchy that sounds, right?”

“I’m not that dangerous, I promise.” At least not to a fireproof ninja like Daniel.

“Yeah, I already know that’s not true,” Daniel smiled. “You’re terrifying.”

“Well, you can run if you want,” I shrugged, looking around at the milling crowd. “I’m sure that won’t blow your cover.”

“See? Terrifying.” There was a pause as he considered me and I held my breath, hoping. Then, “Lucky for you, I don’t scare that easy,” he said. “I’ll come with you, I’ll let you show me whatever you want, but I’m not promising I’ll tell you anything.”

“Deal,” I said, just relieved that I had gotten this far. I could only think one step at a time at this point. Just one step at a time. “Come with me.”

 There weren’t many lockers on the third floor, so we only had to make our way past a few people on our way to Room 301.

“What’s in here?” Daniel asked as I came to a stop in front of the door and checked the hall to make sure no one was around to see us go in.

“It’s an old science room that didn’t pass the last inspection.” No one knew if it was because the facilities were outdated or if there was toxic mold in the ceiling, but the school wasn’t allowed to use it anymore.

“Shouldn’t it be locked?” Daniel said as I opened the door.

“It was. Drew broke in last month to steal some of the old equipment and they never got around to fixing it.”

Once we were inside, I closed the door and turned to face Daniel, leaning back against it.

“Are you just going to stay there?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?” he asked, half smiling, half uneasy. “So I can’t get out?”

“So no one else can get in.”

The blinds were drawn over all the room’s windows.  _No one is going to see you_ , I told myself, taking a deep breath, even as my heart beat too hard against my ribs.  _No one is going to see you._

“Look, I hate to tell you this,” Daniel said in a joking voice, “But if you’re trying to mug me, you picked the wrong—”

“I’m not going to mug you,” I snapped, too anxious to appreciate the attempt at humor. “There’s something I need to show you.”

“Okay,” Daniel said. “What is it?”

“I um…” I was feeling light-headed. “It’s—I’m sorry, it’s just—it’s been a really long time since I let anyone see this.” I was going to try not to think about the last time I had.

“See what?” Daniel asked quietly.

But I didn’t answer. I was concentrating.

This might be the biggest decision—the biggest moment—in my life. The thought of it leading to something completely unknown was scary, but the thought of it leading nowhere was even worse. My anxiety was rising fast inside me. It only took a second to blow past the boiling point, but I seized control of it. Channeling the blaze of nervousness and anticipation into my clenched fists, I let it build—hotter, hotter, hotter, until my fingers were stinging with it.

“I want you to know that I’m not just being nosy for no reason,” I said slowly, keeping my eyes trained on the ground to maintain my concentration. “I need you to tell me what you are and where you came from because… because I think you’re like me.”

“Like you?” Daniel repeated, confused. “What do you mean, ‘like you’?”

In response, I lifted my heated hand, opening up my fingers. The flick of friction was short, but it was all I needed to turn the heat into a spark. Tongues of flame jumped from my skin and I held the fire up between us, lighting up the dim classroom. Normally, I couldn’t sustain a whole handful of flames for more than a second, but as I looked into Daniel's stunned eyes, my pounding heart kept it burning for several long moments.

Daniel’s mouth had fallen open. Slowly, he lifted his own hand and ran his fingers through the fire I had created. In the moment before it went out, I felt Daniel’s touch pulling at it, the flames leaping excitedly up to meet his fingers as though drawn to them. And that erased any doubt in my mind. Daniel was like me. Maybe not exactly like me, but he was like me in the one way that mattered: he could feel the Hum, he could use it. It was part of him like it was part of me.

“Wow!” Daniel exclaimed as the last of the flames flickered out. “H-how did you…?” He took my pale hand in his dark one, turning it over as though searching for some trick or mechanism that would explain the fire.

His fingertips were hot across my palm, alive with a fiery energy of their own. It wasn’t something I could see, but I felt it, crackling like kindling just beneath the skin, pulsing in time with his heart. For my whole life, I had sensed the Hum in the world all around me. I had never sensed it in another person—but there it was, fluttering from Daniel like a thousand tiny wings.

And it wasn’t just the feeling of the Hum that made his touch weirdly familiar. I recognized the smooth, sturdy feel of his skin. It was fireproof, like mine.

“You have my skin,” I blurted out before realizing how weird that sounded.

“You mean tajaka skin?” Daniel looked amused.

“What? What’s tajaka?”

“Tajaka is what  _we_  are,” he laughed. “It’s someone who controls fire.”

“You mean… there’s a word for it?” I asked softly, and for some reason, I felt my throat closing up. There was a word for it. There was a word for me.

“Of course there is.” Daniel’s brow furrowed in confusion. “If you’re—I mean—do you not have a word for it?”

“No.”

“But—why—if you can… if there’s… How did you get those powers?”

“No questions,” I said as though I actually had answers to withhold. “Not until you answer mine.”

“But…” Daniel let my hand go, though he continued to stare at it in bewilderment. “Can other people on this planet control fire? Because I thought—”

“This planet!” I exclaimed. “So you are an alien!”

“What? No.” He laughed again. “I mean—sort of. Not really. It depends on what you’d call an alien. I’m not from this planet, but I am human. I can’t actually be talking to you about this. But—people here aren’t supposed to be able to do that. How can you do that?”

“I told you, I’ll answer your questions when you answer mine,” I said stubbornly.

Daniel let out a distressed sigh. “Joan, I  _can’t_.”

“Why?” I demanded, unable to keep my voice from rising in pitch. “Please! I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“I know. It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s just…” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m the one saying this, but it’s safer that you don’t know.”

“Safer?” I repeated. What was that supposed to mean?

“I know how much it sucks to hear that.” Daniel gave me a miserable look. “I feel like a jerk.”

“Don’t,” I said, almost surprised at the rush of sympathy I suddenly felt for this annoying idiot who had everything I had ever wanted and refused to give it to me. “You’re not a jerk.” As much as I was burning to know what was going on, I understood better than anyone that some things needed to be kept secret. “It’s okay.”

“Listen, I like you,” Daniel said earnestly. “You seem cool, and careful, and probably a lot smarter than me. If it was up to me, I would tell you everything I know right now, but what we’re dealing with here, it’s dangerous stuff. So, I really can’t tell you anything about it without asking my dad about it first—but I’ll talk to him about this as soon as I get home. He’s not around right now, but I’ll call and tell him about you and I’ll see if he thinks it’s a good idea to let you in on our—on the whole thing.”

“Okay.” I nodded, dizzy with a confusing mixture of relief, frustration, and excitement. “Okay.”

“Are you alright?” Daniel asked.

“Yeah. It’s just that I—” I suddenly felt my throat threatening to close up. “Until now, I _—” I thought I was the only one. I thought I was alone._  But when I tried to get the words out, I choked on them, and tears came out instead.

“Oh.” Daniel’s voice took on a note of alarm. “Oh—Gods, are you crying?”

“No,” I insisted, wiping my eyes on my sleeve. I never cried in front of other people. “I just never thought I would meet someone else who… I didn’t think there was anyone else like me.”

“Hey, it’s okay. Don’t cry,” Daniel begged, looking vaguely panicked. “Please. My dad will know what to do. He always does. And I don’t think he would leave you in the dark after what you told me.”

“Really?” I sniffed.

“Really. Look, and if he says we can’t tell you, I’ll convince him to change his mind, okay? Everything’s going to be okay. Please don’t cry.”

“I’m sorry.” I swallowed and pressed my palms into my eyes. “Thank you. Y-you don’t know what this… Thank you so much.”

“Hey, no problem.” Daniel gave my arm a casual cuff with more force than I was used to. I liked the way it felt. It felt real. “I owed you one. You’ve been super nice to me this whole day—well, apart from the stalking thing. You helped me figure out my schedule and showed me where to find my violet.”

“You mean your viola?” I laughed, managing to blink away the last of the tears.

“See, you’re still helping me,” he smiled. “I’d have been kind of a lonely disaster today if I hadn’t run into you.”

I opened my mouth to tell him that my entire life had been a lonely disaster until I ran into him, but felt a tug of tightness in my throat and knew that if I tried to say it, it was going to open the floodgates on an ocean of unshed tears. So I closed my mouth and swallowed the words. There was too much emotion there. More than I was ready to let anyone see.

“I um… I guess w-we should go now,” I said instead, turning the knob behind me and leaning back into the door so that it swung open. I still had a million questions for Daniel, but if he couldn’t answer any of them until he’d talked to his dad, there was no point in torturing myself about it, was there? Best to just go home and try to find some way to keep myself busy until then.

But there was one question I couldn’t stop before it leapt from my mouth. “Can you say the word again?”

Daniel paused partway through the door to look back at me. “What word?”

“The word for people who make fire,” I said, “for people like us.”

“Oh.  _Tajakalu_ ,” he said. The word sounded strange, like it came from a foreign language I had never heard before. “Or just  _tajaka,_  singular,” he added after a moment.

“ _Tajaka_. So… I’m a tajaka?”

“Yes, you are.”

“Cool…” Realizing that I had spent an awkwardly long moment smiling at Daniel, I looked away and stuttered, “I-I still have to get my stuff from my locker, so I’m going this way.”

“Okay. So, I’ll see you tomorrow?”

I nodded. “See you tomorrow.”

And for the first time I could remember, tomorrow felt like something to look forward to.

 


End file.
